Ay ky 
1). Ny VA 


4% 2 
MOOREA ye 
VAN ay 


va} 
, 


Pet bi yy 
Oa bee teak Wao 





<u OF PRINCETG 






y 4 
EOLOGICAL sews’ 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/christianitynatu0Oshaf 


_ Ali i hy ni 
i \ ae 

ae 

ae yal 2 










iis 
Pat 
ve’ 
“he 
2 ( ' Th 
"a 
i 
' H 
] Py a rive 
: arly Ai ee 4 
; int ah Md Aas { i? 
. § iv yoy aes wis ne La We [ ri A 
‘ i i " rh hy My ea vt LAN ig i | a ¥ iL i n 
4 . / M4 | i * Pe , oe ur i . 1 ? 
is et De \ “at At) c OMoE rl 
‘ 


© ay 
ry x 


: iy! ‘ \2 4 
1 i eas 


i ei ee Lf 
Dai} at mie 
a oN ; a es ce 4 re 
{ { ¥ ‘ \y , Th ah Vi bras af 4) q ‘ 
Pad Vt ete eae 


; i | A ies ) i y : : 7 
tary 8 \ ve a a ee ’ ig r 
J Pit Vt ah Leahy ie * if ‘ (i \ : a 
ae Ful iy Abd 


ad By. ed ia ; nA 3 i ¥ ‘ ‘ Ti % dey 

p » . = a); t) PP ; & a A sok iT s ( % iM 

. One Ay yeU) Coy nT, eee a 

mm” 2 £ id 4 mY, > ew 
ie | BP, a fie aa Sa Dai Uv eS ee 

WAGE EARL eta hae a 


“2 
n dei 


Pla hci ya aap) Bae, » : i 


a ; 
A re ay, 4° ee Wate saan ‘a4 ey 


te ; 
" “| Iie vy 7 ‘ri vein, 







a nee 


oh a ae 











> i 
align Sa 4 inl i oe NG) 
: i he 7 ae poy _ ¢ ; 
i. od iv cf 
: < ae) ’ re i ’ 
ih) ie aed i aT a Oe ge Fake 
pee ehady) aa ip he na nS Ae aa . ) 
| thy Py: Ma a rok hy apr at Pal i 
eG: ‘ tar 1! vi , UO (ee pein! peri 
; 2 eee he ie rel at i¢ a aa 4 A ‘ rt > in 
ee hf ve ry, ee Ae lg REL | 





va rs 
Ab iat 
ea 
ls att 


ay : ' if nth) 
a i nb re 
i bye i 


. i ne c 

















e iM yal 
Be, pe 









BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 


Progress and Science: Essays in Criticism 


RN aN OF PRI NCES 
Ay: D> 
~ APR 19 1926 


Seg we 
CHRISTIANITY AND 
NATURALISM 






HSSAYS IN CRITICISM 
SECOND SERIES 


BY ROBERT SHAFER 





NEW HAVEN 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
LONDON, HUMPHREY MILFORD, OXFORD. UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1926 


COPYRIGHT 1926 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO 
PAUL ELMER MORE 





PREFACE 


Tis volume, like its predecessor (Progress and Sci- 
ence), 18 not a systematic treatise, but a series of essays. 
The first six essays were originally written for delivery 
as a course of Ropes Lectures, which I had the honour 
of giving before the University of Cincinnati in the 
spring of 1924. These essays have since been revised, and 
in several cases entirely rewritten. 

I am indebted to the officers of the University—and in 
particular to Dean Louis T. More and to Dean Frank W. 
Chandler—not only for their kind invitation to give a 
course of Ropes Lectures, but also for my appointment 
to a permanent fellowship which has enabled me to com- 
plete the present work under unusually favourable cir- 
cumstances, and to look forward hopefully to the early 
execution of several other literary projects. Too many of 
our colleges and universities, despite the volume of 
printed matter which issues from them annually, have 
become institutions of lecturing rather than of study and 
intellectual inquiry. The wise policy of the University of 
Cincinnati, directed against a false economy which dries 
up the springs of informed and fruitful thought, deserves 
the gratitude and support of our patrons of learning. 

I am obliged to several publishers for permission to 
quote from a number of books: The Idea of a Unwersity, 
Parochial and Plain Sermons, Oxford Unversity Ser- 
mons, Loss and Gain, and Verses on Various Occasions, 
by Cardinal Newman, the Letters and Correspondence of 
John Henry Newman, edited by Anne Mozley, and the 
Life of Cardinal Newman, by Wilfrid Ward (all pub- 
lished by Messrs. Longmans, Green, and Company) ; 
Science and Hebrew Tradition, Science and Christian 
Tradition, Method and Results, and Evolution and Eth- 


Vili « PREFACE 


ics, by T. H. Huxley, and the Life and Letters of Thomas 
Henry Hualey, by Leonard Huxley (Messrs. D. Appleton 
and Company); The Fair Haven, Evolution Old and 
New, Life and Habit, Unconscious Memory, The Way of 
All Flesh, and Notebooks, by Samuel Butler (Messrs. 
E. P. Dutton and Company) ; Poems, Essays in Criticism, 
First and Second Series, Culture and Anarchy, and 
Literature and Dogma, by Matthew Arnold, and the Let- 
ters of Matthew Arnold, edited by George W. EH. Russell 
(The Macmillan Company) ; Unpublished Letters of Mat- 
thew Arnold, edited by Arnold Whitridge (Yale Univer- 
sity Press); The Dynasts and Collected Poems, by 
Thomas Hardy (Messrs. Macmillan and Company, Ltd.) ; 
Creative Chemistry, by EH. B. Slosson (The Century Com- 
pany); and Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology 
and Ethics, by William Wallace (Oxford University 
Press). 

The dedication of these essays to Mr. Paul Elmer More 
commemorates a relationship which dates from my 
undergraduate days. It was then one-sided and unknown 
to him. In more recent years it has happily become a 
friendship marked by good offices on his part for which 
I have much reason to be grateful. 

I owe more than I can attempt to say to my friend 
Professor Charles W. Hendel, jr., of Princeton Univer- 
sity, and to my wife for reading my manuscript and 
making suggestions which have resulted in its marked 
improvement. My wife has also read the proofs and com- 
piled the index. Finally, I cannot omit to mention my 
debt to the staff of the Yale University Press for full 
cooperation and the careful performance of their respon- 
sible work. 

R. 8S. 
Graduate School, 
Umversity of Cincinnati, 
14 January, 1926. 


III. 


VIUL. 


CONTENTS 


. Religious Thought in England in the XVIIth 


and XVIIIth Centuries 


. Coleridge . 


Cardinal Newman 


. Huxley 
. Matthew Arnold . 
. Samuel Butler 


. Thomas Hardy 


Naturalism and Christianity 


Index 


121 


156 


198 


239 


282 


305 


E quel consigho per mighore approbo 

che l’ha per meno, e chi ad altro pensa 

chiamar si puo veracemente probo. 
DANTE 


CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Li 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND IN THE 
XVilts AND XVIIItxs CENTURIES 


1 


/Naruratism is as old as philosophy. In the sixth century 
B.C., in Ionia, civilization had reached a high level. There 
was sufficient wealth for leisure, and the arts of life had 
so far developed as to provide men with the means of 
refined and delicate enjoyment. In Miletus, at least, life 
was pronouncedly secular in character. The crude reli- 
gious beliefs of immemorial tradition could no longer be 
taken seriously and were practically abandoned, though 
stories of the gods, of course, still furnished material for 
both poets and artists. The decay of primitive religion, 
however, disclosed a problem, which was perhaps accen- 
tuated by the refinements of wealth. As life became fuller 
and richer, increased and more varied experience taught 
men that they lived in a world of decay and death, while 
by reason of the same experience the gods who had given 
stability to the scheme of things were become incredible. 
What, then, was the eternal reality underlying the inces- 
sant change of the sensible world? 

This was the question which Thales, the earliest of the 

Vv Milesian philosophers, asked himself, in complete in- 
dependence, apparently, of bankrupt tradition. Of his 
teaching practically nothing is known save that he re- 
garded water as the abiding element of which all things 
are made, and that he said ‘all things are full of gods.’ 
By the latter statement he may have meant, if we can 


/ 


2 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


judge from his followers, that since water was the ulti- 
mate reality, it must have been water in various of its 
manifestations to which people had previously given 
divine names, and that, since all things were formed from 
water, all must contain ‘gods.’ He may, on the other 
hand, have meant nothing so definite as this; but it is 
hardly doubtful that he lived in an atmosphere of im- 
plicit naturalism, and that this he made explicit by trans- 
forming what had been a religious question into a scien- 
tific question. He thus brought both philosophy and 
science into the world. His associate or disciple, Anaxi- 
mander, was thoroughly naturalistic in his outlook, as 
can be seen beyond doubt from trustworthy reports of 
his teaching which still survive: 


Anaximander of Miletus, son of Praxiades, a fellow-citizen 
and associate of Thales, said that the material cause and first 
element of things was the Infinite, he being the first to introduce 
this name for the material cause. He says it is neither water nor 
any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different 
from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and 
the worlds within them. . . . He says that this is eternal and 
ageless, and that it encompasses all the worlds. . . . And into 
that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, 
‘“‘as is ordained; for they make reparation and satisfaction to 
one another for their injustice according to the appointed time,”’ 
as he says in these somewhat poetical terms. . . . And besides 
this, there was an eternal motion, in the course of which was 
brought about the origin of the worlds. . . . He did not ascribe 
the origin of things to any alteration in matter, but said that the 
oppositions in the substratum, which was a boundless body, were 
Separated out. . . . Rain was produced by the moisture drawn 
up from the earth by the sun. . . . The sea is what is left of the 
original moisture. The fire has dried up most of it and turned the 
rest salt by scorching it. . . . He says that the earth is cylindri- 
cal in form, and that its depth is as a third part of its breadth. 


XViIita AND XVIIItaH CENTURIES 3 


. . . The earth swings free, held in its place by nothing. It stays 
where it is because of its equal distance from everything. Its 
shape is convex and round, and like a stone pillar. We are on one 
of the surfaces, and the other is on the opposite side. . . . Living 
ereatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by 
the sun. Man was like another animal, namely, a fish, in the be- 
ginning. . . . The first animals were produced in the moisture, 
each enclosed in a prickly bark. As they advanced in age, they 
came out upon the drier part. When the bark broke off, they 
survived for a short time. . . . Further, he says that originally 
man was born from animals of another species. His reason is that 
while other animals quickly find food by themselves, man alone 
requires a lengthy period of suckling. Hence, had he been origi- 
nally as he is now, he would never have survived. . . . He de- 
clares that at first human beings arose in the inside of fishes, 
and after having been reared like sharks, and become capable of 
protecting themselves, they were finally cast ashore and took to 
land.* 


However some of these passages may appear in the 
light of present-day knowledge, there is every reason to 
believe that none of Anaximander’s teaching was merely 
fanciful. It was grounded on and controlled by such 
observation of the phenomenal world as was possible in 
his day, without regard for commonly received opinion. 
Concerning his theory of the origin of living creatures 
Professor Burnet says: ‘‘It is clear . . . that Anaxi- 
mander had an idea of what is meant by adaptation to 
environment and survival of the fittest, and that he saw 
the higher mammals could not represent the original 
type of animal. For this he looked to the sea, and he 
naturally fixed upon those fishes which present the clos- 
est analogy to the mammalia. The statements of Aris- 

1 Quoted from Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 2d ed., where further 


passages containing fragmentary reports of Anaximander’s teaching are 
also translated. 


<= 


4 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


totle about the galeus levis were shown long ago by 
Johannes Miiller to be more accurate than those of later 
naturalists, and we now know that these observations 
were already made by Anaximander. The manner in 
which the shark nourishes its young furnished him with 
the very thing he required to explain the survival of the 
earliest animals.’’ 

It is impossible, of course, to know how far or how 
definitely Anaximander worked out his naturalistic 
speculations, but it is evident that his view embraced the 
universe as a whole in all its phenomenal appearances 
without distinction, and that he regarded these as varied 
manifestations of a single element which was the sole 
abiding reality underlying all processes of change. Phe- 
nomenal worlds thus formed a self-sufficient system be- 
yond which there was no supernatural cause or reality, 
the elemental substance and motion being enough to 
account for everything. Human beings were natural 
products like any other sensible object, and were to be 
accounted for, with all their characteristics, on the same 
principles. They might be said to partake of eternal life 
as one might say the same thing of a tree, or of the earth 
itself. Human beings and trees both were composed of 
indestructible or eternal substance which remained after 
their periods of individual existence what it had been 
before those periods. Plainly Anaximander’s specula- 
tions were thoroughly naturalistic. He is reported, it is 
true, to have termed the infinite underlying substance 
divine, and likewise the infinite world-systems formed 
from it; but, as Professor Burnet has observed, it was 
this use of the word ‘god’ which caused the Greeks to 
regard the philosophers as atheists. 

It seems well briefly to recall these beginnings of phi- 
losophy because there is a widespread popular impres- 
sion that naturalism has become a formidable power only 


XViIlta AND XVIIItH CENTURIES . 4) 


as a result of the development of modern science, and in 

/particular as a result of the general acceptance of the 
theory of evolution in the latter half of the nineteenth 
century. Echoes of the battle between science and reli- 
gion precipitated by the theory of evolution still ring in 

V our ears, but many are now seeking to assure us that this 
was a temporary and mistaken struggle. We are told that 
there is no real antagonism between the two, but that on 
the contrary they supplement each other in a common 
effort to make the world a better place in which to live. 
Thus a recent theological writer says: ‘‘In the rela- 
tion of religion and science three successive phases may 
be roughly distinguished. The first may be designated 
the period of theological dominance: the second, that of 
independence and conflict: the third, of mutual respect 
and co-operation.’” Similar statements are nowadays 

/ familiar to most of us, but they distort the facts, both 
past and present. 

For naturalism, as I began by saying, is as old as phi- 
losophy. It is one of two rival interpretations or esti- 
mates of the character of life which have existed side by 
side in continuous hostility since the dawn of conscious 
thought. And naturalism has ever been a powerful foe of 
religion, nor had it to await, for this purpose, the de- 

‘velopment of modern science or general acceptance of 
the theory of evolution. This can be seen in a period as 
recent as the eighteenth century, as it is one object of 
the present essay to show. Moreover, the age-long quar- 
et between religion and naturalism is by no means set- 
tled, nor can it be settled by any compromise or ‘peace 
without victory.’ Undoubtedly that particular phase of 
the conflict which helped to make vivid the later years of 
the nineteenth century has now passed, but this is not 


2A, Alexander, The Shaping Forces of Modern Religious Thought, p. 
204. 


t.. 


<= 


6 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


because all the questions at issue have been resolved. It 
is rather because active controversies have their daysdud 
pass from the centre of the stage whether they are set- 
tled or not. Our capacity for attention is limited. If we 
cannot promptly answer a hard question very many of 
us can bear to let it go unanswered; for life is short and, 
meanwhile, there are many diverting possibilities which 
tempt us to the exercise of our right to the pursuit of 
happiness. 

This, however, should not confuse us. It shows neither 
that there is no fundamental hostility between religion 
and naturalism nor that the two have cooperatively 
joined hands with mutual respect for each other. It does 
show that naturalism, or science, has gained a temporary 
victory; and as a matter of fact only those who desire 
the victory of naturalism are satisfied with the present 
situation. Naturalism and science are not, of course, for 


all purposes exactly equivalent terms, but in the present 


connexion they may legitimately be so used. Naturalism 


is simply the statement in philosophic form of the as- 


sumptions on which science is based and of the meaning 
of its revelations. So far as science is incomplete, natu- 
ralism is the more inclusive term, but science cannot dis- 
sociate itself from naturalism without ceasing to be sci- 
ence, and such an abdication will never come unless 
forced by external pressure. It 1s sometimes said that 
science and religion occupy different spheres and that 


’ each can and should pursue its own proper activity with- 


out disturbance from the other. But actually science has 


/ /been continually widening its sphere, and it is at one 
‘with naturalism in claiming for its province the whole 


world of experience. This leaves for religion’s sphere the 
world of the imagination, which is a thinly veiled way of 


Vsaying that religion has nothing to do with reality—a 


contention which no religious man could for a moment 


XVIIts AND XVIIIrH CENTURIES 7 


jadmit. For religion so conceived would have ceased to - 
" ) 9 religion. 

This is one way of stating the deep opposition which 
exists between the two; and it has the advantage of indi- 
cating that religion does not properly have any quarrel 
with knowledge, of whatever kind, so far as knowledge 
is attainable by man, but only with the claims of science 
and with the naturalistic philosophy which speaks in the 

ee of science. This understood, it is still fair to say 
V‘ that he who is not for religion is against it. For the 
divergence between religion and naturalism goes to the 
/{root of things, so that no one can manage to avoid taking 
one side or the other. The mere attempt to remain neutral 
is itself a decision of one kind; because, practically, he 
who attempts neutrality finds himself ranged alongside 
the man who has concluded that modern science has dealt 
religion a blow which, if not fatal, is at any rate serious 
enough to sanction the unreflective pursuit of immediate 
pleasure so far as that is compatible with respectability. 

It is this consideration, the unescapable fact that 
each individual must somehow take sides in this quarrel, 
whether consciously or unconsciously, whether deliber- 
ately or by evasion, will-he nill-he, which leads me to 
believe that a survey of some aspects of religious thought 
in England in the nineteenth century may have an inter- 
est not merely historical in character. It should be obvi- 
ous from the titles of the essays which follow that I do 
not propose to attempt anything like an historical survey 
of the period in the usual sense of the term. Rapid his- 
torical surveys which cover a broad field, however useful 
or necessary they may be for some purposes, are inevi- 
tably superficial; and this is even truer, I think, in the 
history of thought than in political or social history. 
Consequently I shall discuss only a small number of 
writers; but these are, I believe, representative figures, 


8 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


so that consideration of them should carry us at least 
some way towards a real understanding of the religious 
situation in England in the last century. It is first neces- 
sary, however, rapidly to review the course of English 
religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies, which is intimately bound up with the thought of 
the last century, and to this I proceed in the present 
essay. 


1h 


Iv is often said that the Protestant Reformation substi- 
tuted an infallible Book for an infallible Church, and this 


-\is true as far as it goes; yet it is misleading unless we 


remember that the Catholic Church as well as the Protes- 
tant reformers regarded the Bible as divinely inspired. 
The real difficulty lay in the necessity, which neither 
/ Protestants nor Catholics could escape, of showing, first, 
how they knew that the Bible was divinely inspired, and 
of deciding, in the second place, what the Biblical mes- 
sage was. In denying the infallibility of the Church the 
. Protestants repudiated one method of solving this diff- 
culty, but th seby laid themselves under the necessity of 
discovering another. 

The Bible was alleged to contain a direct revelation of 
God’s will, but a revelation made in a former age, to men 
long since gone from earth; how could later generations 
be certain that the Book was all it professed to be, and 
not a fabrication? But even if men agreed in accepting 
the Biblical message as the truth, difficulties were not 
over. For, granting that we do have, collected into a 
book, the Word of God, an all-sufficient guide for the indi- 
vidual’s conduct of his life upon earth if he is to save 
his soul and attain immortal life, still, the question inevi- 
tably arose what this Word of God practically meant, 
what beliefs and what actions it imposed on him who did 


XVIilts AND XVIIItrH CENTURIES 9 


whole-heartedly accept the book as given to men directly 
by the Deity. Here was the crux of the situation. Catho- 
lies asserted that the reality and truth of the Christian 
revelation were guaranteed entirely by the Church, which 
had been instituted for that purpose directly by Jesus 
Christ, and which had enjoyed a continuous life from 
that time. Likewise they asserted that the Church alone 
acting as a spiritual body politic had adequate authority 
to interpret God’s Word and to translate it into articles 
of belief and a code of action. 

This was a claim that because of the alleged divine 
origin of the Church, certain men who were its ministers 
could in each generation transcend universal human limi- 
tations and attain infallibility. This the Protestant re- 
formers denied. They pointed out that the Church was 
composed of a body of fallible men who, as men, were 
liable to mistake and corruption like the rest of us. They 
were able easily to prove this by the many patent, grave, 
and even loathsome abuses in the practice of the Church 
which had long been notorious. They were then able to 
point out that the authority of the Church, rested ulti- 
mately upon documents whose authenticity 1.2 Church 
used its authority to prove. But if this source of author- 
ity, resting in the end only upon such circular reasoning, 
was a delusion, where then was to be found an adequate 
basis for the beliefs of men? It was to be found, Protes- 
tants answered, only in the Bible itself, and to the Bible 
men must return. For better or worse, however, this ap- 
parently plain answer would not hold. Those obstinate 
questions still remained: How could men know that the 
Bible was divinely inspired?—and what did the Bible 
mean, what beliefs and practices did it really enjoin? 
And to answer these questions the reformers had finally 

/ to fall back on the position that religion was essentially 
a personal relation between man and his Maker, and 


at 


10 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


consequently that each individual must be his own final 
‘ authority for his beliefs and actions. 

This was the profoundly significant point which bee 
emerged from the heat of controversy. Protestantism 
was no merely negative movement. It became—not be- 


cause this was what all leaders of the Reformation 
// wanted, but, rather, in spite of the best efforts of so 


powerful a dictator as Calvin, it became the assertion of 
individualism in religion. Complete individualism is the 
denial of all external authority and is synonymous with 
anarchy, a condition regarded with equanimity only by 
those who have a perfect confidence in the goodness of 
human nature. When I say that Protestantism was forced 
by an unescapable logic into individualism I am, of 
course, characterizing a tendency, not describing an ac- 
complished fact. Nevertheless the tendency was plainly 
evident from the beginning. The whole force of Calvin’s 
genius was exerted throughout his career to make an end 
of Protestant anarchy in the only possible way—by call- 
ing into existence a second infallible church. But though 
Calvin’s influence was great, and though all Presby- 
terians still pay him a sort of official homage, he failed 
in his aim. The multiplication of Protestant sects has 
continued from the sixteenth century to the present day. 
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to ascertain how many 
there have been, for very many have been local and 
ephemeral. Many also have been extraordinary in their 
tenets, as is, to take a trivial instance, that still existing 
sect whose members fasten their clothes together with 
hooks and eyes on the ground that buttons are unbiblical. 
One may pardonably be amused by such a harmless ec- 
centricity, but other practices and beliefs which the his- 
torian of Protestantism has to record are of a different 
order, and the situation in northern Hurope and Hng- 
land in the seventeenth century was far from amusing. 


XVilts AND XVIIItH CENTURIES 11 


The problem, indeed, of dealing with innumerable proph- 
ets, each claiming to be the channel of an infallible and 
divine inspiration, was one that shook the foundations 
of society. Accordingly the best energies of the century 
were expended in seeking a solution of the question where 
an adequate centre of authority for belief and conduct 
could be found outside of commonly received tradition. 

It may be permissible to doubt whether any universally 
acceptable answer to this question will ever be found. 
Certainly none has yet been. But men in the seventeenth 
century were not hopeless. Perhaps mercifully, they 
could not see into the future, and they had on their side, 
passed on to them from ancient times through the great 
schoolmen of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 
what may nowadays appear to be a singular trust in 
human reason as an organ of absolute truth. Philosophy 
had long been the handmaiden of theology; it was 
thought to be so still. William Chillingworth in the first 
half of the seventeenth century, the author of the great 
controversial work, The Religion of Protestants a Safe 
Way to Salvation, assumed, as he fairly could, that all 
Christians were agreed as to the authority of the Bible, 
but, if that were questioned, he did not hesitate for an 
answer: ‘‘If Scripture cannot be the judge of any con- 
troversy, how shall that touching the Church and the 
notes of it be determined? And if it be the sole judge of 
this one, why may it not of others? Why not of all? Those 
only excepted wherein the Scripture itself is the subject 
of the question, which cannot be determined but by natu- 
ral reason, the only principle beside Scripture which is 
common to Christians.’’ 

As to the interpretation of Scripture, Chillingworth 
says: ‘‘Every man is to judge for himself with the judg- 
ment of discretion. . . . For if the Scripture (as it is in 
things necessary) be plain, why should it be more neces- 


12 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


sary to have a judge to interpret it in plain places, than 
to have a judge to interpret the meaning of a council’s 
decrees, and others to interpret their interpretations, 
and others to interpret theirs, and so on for ever? And 
where they are not plain, there if we, using diligence to 
find the truth, do yet miss of it and fall into error, there 
is no danger in it. They that err and they that do not err 
may both be saved. So that those places which contain 
things necessary, and wherein error were dangerous, 
need no infallible interpreter, because they are plain; 
and those that are obscure need none, because they con- 
tain not things necessary, neither is error in them dan- 
gerous.’’ And the defender of Protestantism confesses: 
‘‘For my part I am certain that God hath given us our 
reason to discern between truth and falsehood; and he 
that makes not this use of it, but believes things he knows 
not why, I say it is by chance that he believes the truth, 
and not by choice; and that I cannot but fear that God 
will not accept of this sacrifice of fools. But you that 
would not have men follow their reason, what would you 
have them follow?—their passions?—or pluck out their 
eyes and go blindfold? No, you say, you would have them 
follow authority. On God’s name let them; we also would 
have them follow authority; for it is upon the authority 
of universal tradition that we would have them believe 
Scripture. But then, as for the authority which you 
would have them follow, you will let them see reason why 
they should follow it. And is not this to go a little about? 
—to leave reason for a short turn, and then to come to it 
again, and to do that which you condemn in others ?—it 
being indeed a plain impossibility for any man to submit 
his reason but to reason; for he that doth it to authority 
must of necessity think himself to have greater reason 
to believe that authority.’’ 

These passages make Chillingworth’s position clear. 


XViIts AND XVIIItH CENTURIES 13 


The Bible’s authenticity, if questioned, was to be de- 

termined by the use of man’s natural reason; the mean- 
/ /ing of the Bible also was to be determined by man’s natu- 
obscure men could safely conclude that the doubtful 
points were not necessary for salvation. Only that on 
which all men could agree was essential. In other words, 
men needed to accept only that in the Bible which was 
self-evidently true; and, moreover, if they went beyond 
this to accept anything merely on the basis of prescrip- 
tion they were making the perilous ‘‘sacrifice of fools.”’ 
Of course Chillingworth could not, at any rate as a de- 
fender of Christianity, have gone so far as this in draw- 
ing out to its logical conclusion the Protestant position 
had he not been perfectly confident that the voice of 
reason was everywhere one voice and the voice of abso- 
lute truth. And in this he is typical of the greater Hing- 
lish divines throughout the century. Richard Hooker him- 
self, at the close of the preceding century, had shared the 
same confidence in reason, and in so doing was only fol- 
lowing the lead of St. Thomas Aquinas. 

From the period following Chillingworth many exam- 
ples of essentially the same point of view could be in- 
stanced. Benjamin Whichcote wrote a discourse on The 
Glorious Evidence and Power of Divine Truth. ‘‘Truth,’’ 
he said, ‘‘of first inscription is connatural to man, it is 
the light of God’s creation, and it flows from the prin- 
ciples of which man doth consist, in his very first make; 
this is the soul’s complexion.’’ ‘‘ Among other excellences 
of divine truth,’’ he affirmed, ‘‘this is none of the smallest 
weight: that when it is declared it doth recommend itself 
to and satisfies the mind of man concerning its reality 
and usefulness. Men are wanting to themselves, that they 
do not see with their own eyes; that they do not make a 
particular search; that they do not examine; that they do 


14 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


not consider; or, in a word, that they do not use the judge- 
ment of discerning. For we that are of the reformed reli- 
gion, who deny the infallible visible judge, we do allow 
to every Christian a private judgement of discerning not 
only as his privilege that God hath granted him, but as 
his charge.’’ John Smith, in his discourse Of the Eacel- 
lency and N obleness of True Religion, said that men ‘‘are 
content and ready to deny themselves for God,’’ but 
added, ‘‘I mean not that they should deny their own 
reason, as some would have it; for that were to deny a 
beam of divine light, and so to deny God, instead of deny- 
ing ourselves for him.’’ Those philosophers are right, 
he is sure, who say that to follow reason is to follow God. 


III. 


Turse liberal and enlightened divines did not see, of 
course, where man’s natural reason was presently to 
lead him, nor did they realize that the very toleration and © 
free inquiry for which they contended were soon to make 
possible a critical scrutiny of the reason itself, with an 
eye to its capacities, its limitations. I do not mean in say- 
ing this that, had they seen further, they would not have 
followed wherever the argument led, for the greater 
divines of seventeenth-century England were honest 
men; I mean only to point out that these men had no 
doubt whatever that the Christian revelation was ra- 
tional in character, that its truth was strictly demon- 
strable. 

But as early as the second quarter of the seventeenth 
century it was not impossible to see what the future held 
in store. For even thus early Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
elder brother of ‘‘that sweet singer of the Temple,’’ 
George Herbert, was saying that no historical revelation, 
no revelation save it were made directly to one’s self, 


XViita AND XVIIITta CENTURIES 15 


could be accepted by man; nor was a revelation even to 
one’s self necessary in order to salvation. For all men 
by virtue of their very humanity had implanted within 
them certain common notions amongst which were the 
essential articles of religious belief. These, Lord Herbert 
thought, were elements common to all religions of what- 
ever age or place, though in most positive religions they 
might be more or less obscured by varying overgrowths. 
The propositions universally held were five in number: 
(1) That there is a supreme Being or God; 
(2) That this Being should be worshipped; 
(3) That the chief part of his worship consists in vir- 
tue or the proper use of our faculties ; 
(4) That impiety and crimes are to be atoned for by 
repentance; and 
(5) That punishment and reward follow our deeds 
both in this life and in a life to come. 
Since the comparative study of religions was still in its 
infancy in the early seventeenth century, I hardly need 
add that Lord Herbert’s data were very imperfect and 
that nobody now supposes his five propositions to be, or 
ever to have been, universally received articles of belief. 
This, however, does not concern my present point, which 
is simply that Herbert’s conclusion was that no proposi- 
tion beyond these five could be essential to man’s salva- 
tion, and that these essential propositions were naturally 
implanted in the mind of every normal man. This goes 
very far—further, indeed, than Herbert himself cared to 
insist—for his natural-religion not only cuts away the 
necessity of the Christian or any other historical revela- 
tion, but really also denies the validity of any distine- 
tively Christian beliefs. 
It had been all very well for Christian Rome to regard 
herself, like pagan Rome, as the centre of the world, and 
to claim that Christianity was the world’s one religion, 


16 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


as long as the known world was comprehended in the 
lands immediately surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. 
But the activities of Rome’s own missionaries united 
with the larger and now better-known activities of ex- 
plorers to make this pretension increasingly difficult of 
maintenance and finally ridiculous, or tragic, as one 
pleases. By the seventeenth century thinking men could 


no longer blind themselves to the problem created by the 
fact that there were millions upon millions of human 


beings who had lived and died in involuntary ignorance 
of the Christian revelation. Could a deity who was alto- 
gether just and righteous have possibly confined the 
truth essential to salvation in the beginning to one ob- 
scure and specially favoured people, and afterwards to 
those others who gradually in the course of time might by 
hearsay learn this momentous news? Nor was this the 
only difficulty ; for men were also presently to see a gross 
incongruity between the supposition that God had framed 
us reasonable creatures, and the notion that then, through 


“sheer perversity as it might seem, he had made our salva- 


tion to depend upon beliefs which were beyond reason or 
plainly contradictory to reason. 

Lord Herbert of Cherbury is sometimes called the 
father of English deism, but the deistic movement itself 


‘is supposed to have begun with the publication in 1696 


of a book by John Toland which was addressed specifi- 
cally to the latter of the difficulties just mentioned. The 
book was entitled Christianity not Mysterious, or a 
Treatise Showing that there is Nothing in the Gospel 
contrary to Reason, nor above it, and that no Christian 
Doctrine can be properly called a Mystery. The book was 
in one sense harmless enough, as Toland professed to 
find nothing irrational in the Bible. Yet his book raised 
a storm because, whatever his actual words were, his 
general tone was thought to be hostile to Christianity. 


XViIits AND XVIIItx CENTURIES 17 


He was thought, probably with justice, to have meant 
much more than he dared frankly to say. However, 
neither Toland’s private beliefs at this time nor his later 
pantheism are now so interesting as his assertion of the 
supremacy of reason. ‘‘We hold that reason,’’ he said, 
‘is the only foundation of all certitude; and that nothing 
revealed, whether as to its manner or existence, is more 
exempted from its disquisitions than the ordinary phe- 
nomena of nature.’’ ‘‘Religion is not to be modelled 
according to our fancies, nor to be judged of as it relates 
to our private designs.’’ ‘‘Since religion is caleulated for 
reasonable creatures, ’tis conviction and not authority 
that should bear weight with them. A wise and good man 
will judge of the merits of a cause considered only in 
itself, without any regard to times, places, or persons. 
No numbers, no examples, no interests can ever bias his 
solid judgement, or corrupt his integrity. He knows no 
difference between popish infallibility, and being obliged 
blindly to acquiesce in the decisions of fallible Protes- 
tants.’’ 

/ From Toland’s position other deists argued more posi- 
tively against Christianity. Not only were the so-called 
internal evidences of Christianity attacked, but also the 
evidence from alleged prophecies in the Old Testament 
and the evidence from alleged miracles in the New. Prob- 
ably the most important book produced by the movement 
was Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation. Tindal 
did not argue directly that the Christian revelation was 
untrue, but merely contended that whatever in it was 
necessary for salvation must have been discoverable by 
all men at all times from the first appearance of human- 
ity until his own day, simply by the use of natural reason. 
Thus, according to him, a particular historic revelation 
was wholly unnecessary, or gratuitous—though he did 
not deny that it might have taken place. 


18 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


The orthodox were of course not idle when such opin- 
ions were being circulated, and indeed there was a wide- 
spread impression at the time that the deists were 
triumphantly argued down and defeated by the talented 
and learned men who were on the side of wealth, respect- 
ability, and the forces of tradition. The fact is, however, 
that the orthodox on the whole were committed to the 
supremacy of reason as fully as the deists. Toland had 
quoted on the title-page of his Christianity not Mysteri- 
ous a sentence from one of Archbishop Tillotson’s ser- 
mons which shows it plainly enough. ‘‘We need not de- 
sire a better evidence,’’ said Tillotson, ‘‘that any man is 
in the wrong than to hear him declare against reason, and 
thereby to acknowledge that reason is against him.’” 
Tillotson, of course, was merely maintaining a position 
which earlier defenders of Protestant Christianity had 
confidently taken up; while the deists were merely deriv- 
ing an unexpected conclusion from the same premises. 
Thus the apparent differences between the two camps, 
being much greater than the real ones, tended to give a 
certain artificiality to the whole controversy. The true 
God, both sides agreed, was the God of reason; was the 
Christian revelation necessary for man’s right relation 
with him?—or was it, as an act of favouritism, irrecon- 


8 Sermon LVI (Works, ed. of 1820, IV, 45), The Excellency of Abra- 
ham’s Faith and Obedience (preached in 1686). Tillotson had studied 
Hobbes’s Leviathan (for references to it see Sermon LXV, Works, IV, 233, 
and Sermon CLIII, tbid., VII, 177), and in the sentence used by Toland 
was repeating what this arch-enemy had said. In Chap. XI of the Levia- 
than (p. 50, ed. of 1651) Hobbes had asserted that men, in basing their 
actions on precedent, are ‘‘like little children, that have no other rule of 
good and evill manners, but the correction they receive from their Parents, 
and Masters; save that children are constant to their rule, whereas men are 
not so; because grown strong, and stubborn, they appeale from custome 
to reason, and from reason to custome, as it serves their turn; receding 
from custome when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against 
reason, as oft as reason is against them.’’ 


XViItx AND XVIIIrH CENTURIES 19 


cilable with God’s goodness and justice, and hence to be 
regarded as, if not false, unnecessary ? 
Uf The general result of the controversy was the decay of 
living religion. The God discoverable by reason was a 
vague and remote abstraction—the great Uncaused 
Cause. And when this First Cause had brought the world 
into existence and established its unalterable laws his 
active relationship with it had ceased. Thenceforward 
the world went its way automatically. The First Cause 
was demonstrably a perfect being. Consequently—as 
Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke and Pope agreed—‘‘ What- 
ever is, is right.’’ The world is perfect, it seemed neces- 
sary to conclude, because its Creator is perfect. Common 
sense tells us that the world is not perfect. Even those 
who are most fortunate in the possession of natural en- 
dowments and worldly goods, and who are well satisfied 
with life as they find it, admit that there are some diffi- 
culties involved in existence which they would change 
if they could. However, the proponents of the new view 
had a reply to this objection. The appearance of evil in 
the world they readily admitted, but they contended that, 
since it is logically certain that the world as a whole is 
perfect, existing evils must be only apparent, not real. 
-Man cannot see the world as a whole, but only its parts, 
and not more than a few of them; hence he should realize 
that what seems evil to him must be in reality only a 
lesser good, necessary in order that the whole may be a 
perfect harmony. ‘‘ Whatever is, is right.’’? This was the 
outcome of the religion of nature—a complacent opti- 
mism which preached the satisfied acceptance of things as 
they are. A more complete contradiction of the grinding, 
tragic world of actual experience cannot be imagined, nor 
a more complete denial of the foundation of religious 
belief. 


20 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


IV. 


/Sucn was one result of the progress of free inquiry. 
{ Meanwhile Locke, towards the close of the seventeenth 
century, had begun to scrutinize reason itself. Those 
notions common to all men which Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury had catalogued struck him doubtfully and, in gen-— 
eral, he considered that we might reason more securely if 
we first carefully determined what we are able to know— 
what is the province and competence of reason. ‘The 
famous Essay on the Human Understanding determined 
the course of philosophical inquiry for a century. Locke, 
if one may state his conclusion in a couple of words, 
limited the sphere of knowledge to the field of possible 
human experience, and decided that even within this field 
there could be no science of reality. He was not entirely 
consistent and did not see all the implications of his 
premises. The completion of the line he took came, a 
generation or more later, in the work of Hume. 
Hume was the one thinker of the eighteenth century 
. who knew completely what he was about and who was not 
afraid to face his conclusions, whatever they were. And 
(in Hume’s hands reason became a wonderful and inex- 
plicable instinct, adequate for our practical needs, but 
for nothing more. He showed that there could be no sci- 
ence of reality, because we can become acquainted only 
with the appearances of things. We can attain merely 
an empirical or provisional knowledge of the sequences 
of phenomena. There can, moreover, be no rational proof 
“of the existence of God. All metaphysical speculation, in 
' short, can be nothing other than mere speculation. Thus 
the sceptical attack upon the pretensions of rationalism 
came to a nihilistic conclusion which would have horrified 
Locke, and which swept the ground from under the feet 
of the oblivious theologians, absorbed in argument 
amongst themselves. 


XVIiIlta AND XVIIIta CENTURIES 21 


// The separation of theology from philosophic thought 
‘“ which thus came about is significant. And, moreover, 
Bee Cy was for the most part as far from the realities 
of life as it was from grasping the meaning of the prog- 
ress of philosophic inquiry. In general, eighteenth-cen- 
tury theology seems to have been hollow and vain, and 
it was, certainly, Christian only in name. A thinker like 
so he believed in God’s existence. More than that, he con- 
formed to the Church of England as by law established. 
And he tells us why. It was for the sake of social order. 
It was a duty to give an example of respect for law. Like 
many others, he believed that morality would suffer 
amongst the vulgar, unlearned multitude unless it were 
supported by the supposedly religious foundation of a 
belief in future rewards and punishments. But for him- 
self he preferred a purer morality than that which he 
supposed Christianity to teach, and consequently in his 
private capacity he looked to the Stoics of pagan 
antiquity. 
In many churchmen of the eighteenth century a 
i roughly similar, though often less attractive, state of 
mind prevailed. These churchmen were servants of the 
state. As public-spirited subjects they exhibited an ex- 
/ternal profession of Christianity, which they believed 
to be necessary for social order and prosperity. In their 
Vactual teaching, however, they aimed only at the inculea- 
tion of worldly prudence. They dutifully took their start- 
ing-point from the Bible but their sermons were not 
expositions of the teaching of Jesus;—they were rather 
lessons in the means of explaining it away. Thus that 
excellent man, Samuel Clarke, though he nominally ad- 
mitted the world’s corruption, still conceived that an ade- 
quate piety made no unreasonable demands upon men. 
In this age, he told his flock, we are required ‘‘only to 


22 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


retrench our vain and sinful expenses; not to sell all and 
give to the poor, but to be charitable out of the super- 
fluity of our plenty; not to lay down our lives, or even 
the comfortable enjoyments of life, but to forsake the 
unreasonable and unfruitful pleasures of sin.”’ 

In similar strain Bishop Atterbury warned his audi- 
tory that there might be poisonous extremes of righteous- 
ness as of other things—even charity might lead them 
into folly if they overdid it after the manner of some 
Catholic saints. He also told his contemporaries that we 
are not bound to spread Christianity at the risk of our 
lives, when we have no longer the power of working 
miracles, though he did add that it is not our duty to 
deride men whose honest zeal has carried them beyond 
this moderate point of view. And, again, the once-famous 
Hugh Blair cried out inspiringly: ‘‘We call you not to 
renounce pleasure, but to enjoy it in safety. Instead of 
abridging it we exhort you to pursue it on an extensive 
plan. We propose measures for securing its possession 
and for prolonging its duration.’’ Blair properly enough 
said that Christ is our great example; but, then, he ap- 
parently thought it was Christ’s special merit that he 
indulged in ‘‘no unnatural austerities, no affected singu- 
larities,’’ but practiced those virtues ‘‘for which we have 
most frequent occasion in ordinary life.’’ In short, as 
Leslhe Stephen says, ‘‘Christ’s deportment was unim- 
peachable.’’* 

These citations make sufficiently plain how far osten- 
‘sible Christianity had gone in forced accommodation of 
the teaching of Jesus to the spirit of worldliness. That 

4 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Chap. XII, 
Sec. ii, to which I am also indebted for the above quotations (in this and 
the preceding paragraph) from divines whose works are at present inacces- 
sible to me. In common with all other students of English thought, I owe 


much to Stephen’s work, and take this opportunity of gratefully acknowl- 
edging my debt. 


XViita AND XVIIItra CENTURIES 23 


spirit was not in sole possession of eighteenth-century 
England, but it was in singularly complete possession of 
the upper and middle classes and of the dominant spokes- 
men in politics, in literature, and even in theology. It is 
not unfair to say that the typical man of the eighteenth 
century was comfortable, with more than a sufficiency 
of wealth, and was self-satisfied and materially-minded. 
His chief concern was the safe enjoyment of the pleas- 
ures of worldly life. Disturbing questions easily vexed 
him, and were simply to be dismissed. Self-knowledge, 
reflectiveness—what good lay in that direction compar- 
able to the joys of the bottle and the chase?—comparable 
to the exhilarations of cultivated society and the flow of 
sophisticated wit? 


V. 


Tue historian Gibbon, though far indeed from typical in 
his wide and accurate learning, in his intellectual grasp, 
yand in his command of a brilliant if elaborate and formal 
style, may still be said fairly to represent the practical 
result of eighteenth-century life and thought. If one takes 
him as he is and asks no questions, his is a sunny, pleas- 
ant nature; and one may go far without finding a better 
companion for one’s ordinary moments than the urbane 
and polished gentleman whom one meets in the pages of 
his Memoirs and of his Decline and Fall of the Roman 
_ Empire—both abiding classics in their kinds. It is neces- 
sary, however, here to ask questions; what were his be- 
liefs, what his attitude towards life?—-what was the spirit 
of the man? 
The answers are plain. Gibbon was a man frankly 
pleased with life as he found it. He was pleased with 
‘himself, pleased with the cultivation of his age, pleased 
with the progress of reason. And what did reason mean 
to him? Well, in the first place he fully shared the eight- 


24 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


eenth-century theologian’s dread of being righteous over- 
much; with the theologian he loathed enthusiasm, as they 
all called it, or, as we should say, fanaticism. To that 
passionate conviction which pushes a man to such ex- 
tremities of action as we call heroic or insane, depending 
on how the action itself affects us and our interests, Gib- 
bon opposed an attitude calm, detached, sceptical, and 
even, an unfriendly witness would say, supercilious. This 
species of critical outlook condemned him to see every- 
thing that differed from his own age and its standards 
from the outside, so that he observed only the surface 
of life and grasped things only in their external relation- 
ships. But at the same time he did keep his head, as we 
say, or his prejudices, as some would say, and his seren- 
ity; he did remain self-possessed, and this was to be rea- 
sonable. 

_ Preservation of a rational frame of mind also meant 
“that one must recognize the limitations of reason. What 
was rational was true, what was irrational was false ;— 
this, of course, was the essence of rationalism, and here 
there were no limitations whatever to diminish rea- 
son’s authority. Yet it is also true that the progress of 
rational inquiry through the century had steadily nar- 
rowed the field wherein reason could work to any effect. 
I have already pointed out how Locke attempted to nar- 
row this field to the sphere of human experience and how 
under Hume’s dissolving analysis reason was shown to 
be incompetent for all metaphysical inquiry. So things 
had gone; and thus to be rational had come to mean that 
one rested upon the merely empirical data of past experi- 
ence—a sufficiently wide range still, it was thought, for 
the happy conduct of life. Theoretical certainty or abso- 
lute knowledge was an impossibility in any direction, in 
any subject; but practical guidance such as might be 
derived from the range of human experience remained an 


XVIiIts AND XVIIItH CENTURIES 29 


open field. An open field—though even here the rational 
mind had to accept novel limitations, as experience could 
guide us only in the profitable conduct of our present 
earthly lives, without reference to any possibilities be- 
yond that circle. Hume himself obediently and consist- 
ently turned from philosophy to the writing of history. 
His own motives probably were mixed, but that makes 
his procedure none the less significant, as the change was 
perfectly in accordance with his philosophic conclusions. 
In all this Gibbon was completely at one with Hume, and 
this, then, is what a rational frame of mind meant to him. 
/ How did it work practically? There are all the volumes 
of the Decline and Fall to answer that question, and in 
particular the famous fifteenth and thirty-seventh chap- 
_ ters, in which Gibbon treats of ‘‘The Progress of the 
/ ¥ Christian Religion, and the Sentiments, Manners, Num- 
bers, and Condition of the Primitive Christians,’’ and 
of ‘‘The Origin, Progress, and Effects of the Monastic 
Life.’ Gibbon’s language about religion is, nearly 
jalways, outwardly polite, so that frequently his real atti- 
tude is conveyed by means of the irony so congenial to 
/his temperament. Probably his most effective stroke 
‘ against Christianity is his explanation of its early suc- 
cess. 
_ We are naturally curious, he says, to learn the means 
/by which Christianity obtained its remarkable victory 
over religions already established. An ‘‘obvious but satis- 
factory answer’’ is that it triumphed because of ‘‘the 
convincing evidence of the doctrine itself,’’ and because 
of ‘‘the ruling providence of its great Author. But, as 
truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception 
in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently 
condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and 
the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to 
execute its purpose; we may still be permitted, though 


26 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


with becoming submission, to ask not indeed what were 
the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid 
growth of the Christian church. It will, perhaps, appear 
Vthat it was most effectyally favoured and assisted by the 
five following causes I, The inflexible, and if we may use 
the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, de- 
rived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified 
from the narrow and unsocial spirit which, instead of 
inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the 
law of Moses. II, The doctrine of a future life, improved 
by every additional circumstance which could give weight 
and efficacy to that important truth. III, The miraculous 
powers ascribed to the primitive church. IV, The pure 
and austere morals of the Christians. V, The union and 
discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually 
formed an independent and increasing state in the heart 
of the Roman empire.’” 

Doubtless this seca of causes would not be ob- 
jected to by a Christian reader, were he able to take Gib- 
bon at his word. But this, of course, Gibbon himself 
makes impossible. It is clear that he gives no credit either 
to ‘‘the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself’’ or to 
‘‘the ruling providence of its great Author,’’ and that 
for him the secondary causes of the rise of Christianity 
are the real causes. If, then, the-Christian reader begins 
to ask questions about these causes, he quickly completes 
his discovery that Gibbon’s treatment of this subject de- 
pends upon certain assumptions very characteristic of 
the eighteenth century. What, for example, supported 
the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the early Christians? 
To this Gibbon has in the end two answers; one was a 
very popular mode of explanation in his day—people had 
been fooled by the machinations of ambitious priests 
eager for power. His other answer is that the Jews had 
for some reason always been a race extreme in all things ; 


XViilta AND XVIIITtTH CENTURIES 27 


whatever they believed they believed passionately, de- 
votedly, fanatically. The early Christians inherited the 
bigotry of the Jews, while they discarded their jealous 
disposition, which had prevented the Jewish religion 
from spreading. 

No one now, whatever his point of view, would con- 
sider these satisfactory answers to the question asked. 
It is, I should suppose, universally recognized at present 
that while religions create priests, who may or may not 
then serve their religions scrupulously and self-sacrific- 
ingly, priests do not create religions. And Gibbon’s 
second answer is at least a partial evasion. He is, in fact, 
unable to account for early Christian zeal because he took 
a wholly external view of Christianity and had decided in 
advance that it had no legitimate foundation. 

It is hardly necessary, for an understanding of his 

Y attitude, to examine in detail Gibbon’s explanation of all 
of his five causes. It will be enough to pause over the 
“ second, the doctrine of a future life. He points out ‘‘the 
ignorance, the errors, and the uncertainty’’ of the wisest 
and best instructed men of pagan antiquity with regard 
to the immortality of the soul. Many armed themselves 
against the fear of death with the melancholy reflexion 
that the fatal stroke at any rate releases us from life’s 
calamities, and ‘‘that those can no longer suffer who no 
longer exist.’’ But, he says, there were a few Greek and 
Roman sages who had a more exalted and perhaps a 
juster conception of human nature, though it has to be 
confessed that in this sublime inquiry ‘‘their reason had 
been often guided by their imagination,’’ and their imagi- 
nation by their vanity. ‘‘When they viewed with com- 
placency the extent of their own mental powers, when 
they exercised the various faculties of memory, of fancy, 
and of judgement in the most profound speculations, or 
the most important labours, and when they reflected on 


28 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


the desire of fame, which transported them into future 
ages far beyond the bounds of death and of the grave; 
they were unwilling to confound themselves with the 
beasts of the field, or to suppose that a being, for whose 
dignity they entertained the most sincere admiration, 
could be limited to a spot of earth and to a few years 
of duration. With this favourable prepossession, they 
summoned to their aid the science, or rather the lan- 
guage, of metaphysics. They soon discovered that, as 
none of the properties of matter will apply to the opera- 
tions of the mind, the human soul must consequently be a 
substance distinct from the body, pure, simple, and spirit- 
ual, incapable of dissolution, and susceptible of a much 
higher degree of virtue and happiness after the release 
from its corporeal prison.’’ 

From these high principles, Gibbon continues, phi- 
losophers who followed after Plato drew the very un- 
justifiable conclusion that the human soul not only was 
destined to a future immortality but had already enjoyed 
a past eternity, because it was, as they considered, ‘‘a 
portion of the infinite and self-existing spirit which per- 
vades and sustains the universe. A doctrine thus re- 
moved beyond the senses and the experience of mankind 
might serve to amuse the leisure of a philosophic mind; 
or, in the silence of solitude, it might sometimes impart 
a ray of comfort to desponding virtue; but the faint 
impression which had been received in the schools was 
soon obliterated by the commerce and business of active 
life. We are sufficiently acquainted with the eminent per- 
sons who flourished in the age of Cicero, and of the 
Cesars, with their actions, their characters, and their 
motives, to be assured that their conduct in this life was 
never regulated by any serious conviction of the rewards 
or punishments of a future state. At the bar and in the 
senate of Rome the ablest orators were not apprehensive 


XViIitra AND XVIIItrH CENTURIES 29 


of giving offence to their hearers by exposing that doc- 
trine as an idle and extravagant opinion, which was re- 
jected with contempt by every man of a liberal education 
and understanding.’’ 

Since, consequently, the impartial historian says, ‘‘the 
most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther 
than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or at most 
the probability of a future state, there is nothing, except 
a divine revelation, that can ascertain the existence, and 
describe the condition, of the invisible country which is 
destined to receive the souls of men after their separa- 
tion from the body.’’ But, he adds, the popular religions 
of Greece and Rome were very unequal to so arduous a 
task, and it was reserved to the ambitious priests of the 
ignorant barbarians in India, Assyria, Egypt, and Gaul, 
to inculcate this important truth. We might naturally 
expect that a principle so essential to religion would also 
have been revealed to the Jews, and, too, that it might 
safely have been entrusted to them. But no, he says, we 
can only ‘‘adore the mysterious dispensations of Provi- 
dence’’ when we find that Moses knew nothing of the 
soul’s immortality, that the prophets of Israel but darkly 
insinuated it, and that during the long period between 
the Egyptian and the Babylonian servitudes the Jews 
confined their hopes and fears within the narrow com- 
pass of the present earthly life. Hiven in the time of Jesus 
the Sadducees, because of their strict adherence to Mo- 
saic law, piously rejected the notion of a future life. The 
Pharisees, however, being less strict, had recently ad- 
mitted into their beliefs this and several other specula- 
tive tenets drawn from the philosophy or religion of the 
Hast. This doctrine so congenial to human desires, once 
it was admitted, they upheld zealously; but their zeal, 
as Gibbon notes, added nothing to its evidence, or even 
probability. Thus it was the authority of Jesus which 


30 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


alone made the doctrine a fundamental tenet amongst 
the early Christians, and amongst them it was very 
powerfully strengthened by an opinion which, as he puts 
it, ‘‘has not been found agreeable to experience.’’ This 
was the opinion that the end of the world and the King- 
dom of Heaven were at hand. He says: ‘‘'The revolution 
of seventeen centuries has instructed us not to press too 
closely the mysterious language of prophecy and revela- 
tion; but, as long as, for wise purposes, this error was 
permitted to subsist in the church, it was productive of 
the most salutary effects on the faith and practice of 
Christians.’’ Finally, he points out that the Christians 
joined to the doctrine of a future life the promise of eter- 
nal punishment for unbelievers, and urged this considera- 
tion with so much force that ignorant and credulous 
pagans were brought to conversion through their terror. 

With like irony Gibbon treats the whole subject of the 
‘rise and triumph of Christianity. So far as, in this treat- 
ment, questions of historical fact were concerned, he was 
on firm ground and was well served by his scepticism. 
It had been argued for generations that, on the one hand, 
the company of early Christian martyrs had exhibited a 
depth of certitude that might in itself fairly command 
our own assent to their beliefs, and that, on the other, 
the swift success of Christianity in displacing the almost 
myriad religions of the peoples of the Roman Empire 
was a phenomenon so akin to the miraculous that this too 
could be accounted for only on the basis of divine sanc- 
tion. But Gibbon showed, in a manner not seriously to be 
challenged save in unimportant particulars, that both the 
persecution and the numbers of the early Christians had 
been grossly exaggerated, and that there was nothing 
really extraordinary in the actual spread of Christianity 
—nothing that could not be completely accounted for by 


XViIlts AND XVIIItaH CENTURIES 31 


the conditions of the time and the operation of natural 
human motives. 
This was wholesome and sound, but Gibbon of course 
went further. In deflating the pretensions of Christians 
/ regarding the early history of their religion he also at- 
tacked its claim to a divine origin and its fundamental 
articles of belief. The character and effectiveness of his 
attack I have sought to illustrate. Historic Christianity 
/ he considered to be a baseless fabric of superstition, and 
he lost no opportunity in the Decline and Fall to make 
this clear. He even commended Mahometanism at the 
expense of Christianity on the ground that it embodies a 
purer form of theism, less overlaid with superstitions in 
the shape of dogmas that carry us beyond the range of 
human experience. And he regarded the Christianization 
of Europe as a melancholy retrogression—a dark descent 
from the rational altitudes of thought attained by the 
best minds amongst the pagans of classical antiquity. 
This descent, moreover, he thought adequately explained 
by the ignorance, the credulity, and the vanity of bar- 
barians. 
_ Gibbon was not prepared for the outcry which was 
raised against his pages on their publication. He says in 
his Memoirs: ‘‘Had I believed that the majority of Eng- 
lish readers were so fondly attached even to the name 
and shadow of Christianity; had I foreseen that the 
pious, the timid, and the prudent would feel or affect to 
feel with such exquisite sensibility, I might perhaps have 
softened the two invidious chapters [the fifteenth and 
sixteenth]. . . . But the shaft was shot, the alarm was 
sounded, and I could only rejoice, that if the voice of our 
priests was clamorous and bitter, their hands were dis- 
armed of the powers of persecution. . . . Let me frankly 
own that I was startled at the first volleys of this ecclesi- 
astical ordnance; but as soon as I found that this empty 


32 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


noise was mischievous only in the intention, my fear was 
converted to indignation, and every feeling of indigna- 
tion or curiosity has long since subsided in pure and 
placid indifference.’’ Gibbon probably remained, after 
his brief, youthful excursion into Catholicism, a believer 
in a First Cause, but this was hardly more than a con- 
ventional gesture, and it had no perceptible effect upon 
his rational, or worldly, outlook. His was eminently a 
safe, conformable personality, and he evidently believed 
he had done all that was necessary to conciliate his public 
in avoiding an open and direct attack upon a system of 
belief which it was still respectable to profess, but not 
to act upon. When, nevertheless, he was assailed, it never 
voecurred to him that his opponents might have motives 
that were both sincere and worthy of respect. In other 
‘words, religion was really a closed book to him. The 
attacks surprised him, and roused in him a temporary 
curiosity concerning his fellow human beings, but left 
him on the whole indifferent as soon as he had made sure 
that they were to be only verbal and were not to endanger 
his personal safety. Probably, too, he was correct in his 
cynical estimate of the motives behind many, if not all, 
of the attacks levelled against him. 

For, as I have said, Gibbon is fairly representative 
of the practical result of eighteenth-century life and 
thought. He is typical in his complacency, in his irreli- 
gion, in his sceptical rationalism, and in his frank eleva- 
tion of selfish enjoyment as the only end for man to 
pursue. His estimate of life, thoroughly naturalistic in 
‘everything save in name, I have represented as the even- 
tual outcome of English Protestantism. This, it seems to 
me, is the only conclusion which the facts make possible, 
but I must repeat that Protestant individualism and 
rationalism were the complete antithesis of what the 
leaders of the Reformation wanted. The individualism 


XVIiItra AND XVIIITtH CENTURIES 33 


and the rationalism made their appearance, and re- 
’ mained, despite all that Calvin and others could do to 
prevent it, because they were implicit in the very nature 
of Protestantism. And I am of course aware that other 
factors of the utmost importance entered in as contribu- 
tory causes—the humanism of the Renaissance, and the 
inventions and discoveries which led Bacon and Des- 
eartes to predict the indefinite progress of man in the 
control of natural phenomena for his own purposes. 
Nevertheless, these were what I have named them, con- 
tributory causes. And Protestantism, acting as a prin- 
ciple of dissipation and working from the beginning to 
discredit Christianity from within, powerfully helped to 
open the English mind to their influence and provided a 
congenial soil in which the influence could fruitfully grow. 


18h 
COLERIDGE 


i 


In the eighteenth century religion had come to be centred 
in mere intellectual assent to a body of metaphysical doc- 
trine which, by some, was thought to be susceptible of 
rational proof or, by others, was thought to be guaran- 
teed by divine revelation. But at the same time the eriti- 
cal scrutiny of reason, of the Bible, and of history had 
undermined both of these contentions so deeply that 
metaphysics and religion tended to be dismissed together 
as mere dreaming and mere superstition. Again, religion 
had become so externalized in character and so attenu- 
ated in force that it could do no more than point to 
worldly prudence as the sum of its message to mankind. 
The philosophers agreed that practical wisdom was 
summed up in prudence, but pointed out that it needed 
no religious basis, because the esteem of prudence was 
sufficiently accounted for by its social usefulness. And 
the general result was that believers and unbelievers 
alike tended to rest in a point of view which we stigma- 
tize with such a word as materialistic. It was a stagnant 
period, in which self-satisfaction and complacency 
reigned. Men took the solid comforts of life without 
apology, and found them good. If they had general views 
at all they regarded the universe as a mechanism, the 
deity, provided there was one, as the great master- 
mechanic, and themselves as small machines, and often 
very clever ones. Their conduct was determined mechani- 
cally, too, by self-interest, enlightened or otherwise. 


COLERIDGE 30 


There were of course exceptions; and at least two of 
them are of high significance, because both William Law 
—the author of a celebrated book, A Devout Call to a 
Serious and Holy Infe—and John Wesley gave practical 
proof that there existed in human nature qualities en- 
tirely neglected by the intellectualists. Yet neither Law 
nor Wesley exerted any influence upon the course of 
elghteenth-century thought. Wesley, it is true, lived to 
count his adherents by the thousands, but his achieve- 
ment was generally regarded as negligible, on the ground 
that it was the result of mere ‘enthusiasm’ or fanaticism 
aroused by preaching which could appeal only to the 
ignorant. 

Despite the scepticism and worldliness of the eight- 
eenth century, however, the public profession of Chris- 
tianity remained a practically essential badge of respect- 
ability throughout the period, particularly at both of 
the universities. It was a characteristically English com- 
promise, for the sake of which clarity was sacrificed and 
hypocrisy often encouraged, but which at least preserved 
the traditional forms of religious expression. That this, 
as I imply, had its good side no one is likely to deny in 
the face of present-day knowledge of the evils attendant 
upon sudden and violent revolutions. But of course it 
had its bad side also. Traditional forms of religious 
expression continued to exist apparently untouched and 
unharmed, while in reality life and thought were proceed- 
ing ever further upon an independent line of their own. 
It is remarkable that the great Wesleyan revival of reli- 
gious emotion could create a new church of large propor- 
tions and could bring into being the Evangelical party 
within the Anglican Church, really without either dis- 
turbing or being touched by contemporary thought. It 
was a situation fruitful of confusion. No one, I suppose, 
ever succeeds in achieving a completely unified attitude 


36 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


towards life, but, still, this is recognized as an aim worthy 
of a man’s utmost efforts. Yet the situation in England 
not only rewarded men for holding fundamentally incon- 
sistent beliefs but made it difficult or impossible for them 
to detect them. 

Everybody knows Matthew Arnold’s eloquent descrip- 
tion of Oxford as the chosen sanctuary of ‘‘lost causes’’ 
and ‘‘impossible loyalties,’’ and Cambridge in this mat- 
ter was not far different. Striking instances of what was 
possible there as late as the middle of the nineteenth 
century are afforded by the cases of Leslie Stephen and 
of Samuel Butler, the author of Hrewhon and The Way 
of All Flesh. Stephen professed Christianity as a matter 
of course and while an undergraduate felt no influences 
which opened his mind to a realization that there were 
any serious difficulties in so doing; more than that, he 
took holy orders, without conscious insincerity, as he 
says,’ and remained for several years a clerical fellow of 
a Cambridge college before his misgivings became too 
much for him. The very similar experiences of Ernest 
Pontifex in Butler’s The Way of All Flesh are, we are 
told, a faithful picture, on the whole, of what Butler him- 
self went through at Cambridge and afterwards. 

One eminent case of unconscious self-contradiction, 
which occurred about a century earlier and which, unlike 
those just mentioned, was never resolved, is that of the 
‘fexcellent and pious’’ David Hartley, whose Observa- 
tions on Man, his Frame, Duty, and Expectations was 
published in 1749. This work consists of two parts. In 
the first, Hartley treats of man’s body and mind on a 
basis of materialistic determinism. Yet Hartley never 
doubted the real existence of God, and in the second part 
of his work he undertook to prove it. ‘‘It is most notice- 
able,’’? as Coleridge remarks, that in this second portion, 


1 Some Early Impressions, p. 67. 


COLERIDGE 37 


‘‘he makes no reference to the principles or results of 
the first. Nay, he assumes as his foundation ideas which, 
if we embrace the doctrine of his first volume, can exist 
nowhere but in the vibrations of the ethereal medium 
common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the 
whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible 
exceptions, independent of his peculiar system.”’ 

So Coleridge wrote in the Biographia Iiteraria, but he 
himself had not always realized that Hartley was pro- 
foundly inconsistent and that on the basis of his ‘‘pecul- 
iar system’’ all talk of man’s duty was vain, and all 
belief in the existence of God delusory. Coleridge was 
born in 1772 and grew to manhood in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It was probably while he was an undergraduate at 
Cambridge that he read Hartley’s Observations. He was 
immediately carried away into eager discipleship. In 
1796 he even named his eldest son after Hartley as a 
sign of veneration. Yet at the same time Coleridge was 
then, while a materialist and necessitarian in philosophy, 
a theist in religion. For Coleridge from boyhood to death 
never wavered in his belief in the existence of God, save- 
for a brief period after reading Voltaire. And his alle- 
oiance to Hartley was a temporary aberration, which in 
time helped to open his eyes to the real bearings of 
empiricism, but which did not permanently colour his 
thought. 

Coleridge said once, ‘‘Every man is born an Aristo- 
telian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any 
one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I 
am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aris- 
totelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which 
it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one con- 
siders reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers 
it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to 
understand what Plato meant by an idea... . With 


38 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Plato ideas are constitutive in themselves.’” In this sense 
one may say that Coleridge was born a Platonist, and to 
that extent was born religious. He was bound sooner or 
later to revolt against the ‘‘mechanical philosophy,’’ 
whether that was masked by professions of belief in a 
deity or not, and he was bound so to do, not because of 
external influences, but because of the inner law of his 
nature. | 

The best source of information concerning Coleridge’s 
early youth is a series of autobiographical letters which 
he addressed, beginning in 1797, to his friend Thomas 
Poole. In one of these letters there is a passage of the 
greatest importance which shows at how young an age 
he caught some vision of unseen, immaterial reality. In 
it he writes, it is true, in the language of his later 
thought, but there is no reason to doubt that he gives a 
faithful picture of his childhood self. ‘‘I read,’’ he tells 
Poole, ‘‘every book that came in my way without distinc- 
tion; and my father was fond of me, and used to take me 
on his knee and hold long conversations with me. I re- 
member that at eight years old I walked with him one 
winter evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ot- 
tery, and he told me the names of the stars and how 
Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, 
and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had 
worlds rolling round them; and when I came home he 
showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with a 
profound delight and admiration, but without the least 
mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early 
reading of fairy tales and genil, etc., etc., my mind had 
been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my 
senses In any way as the criteria of my belief. I regu- 
lated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, 
even at that age. Should children be permitted to read 

2 Table Talk, 2 July, 1830. 


COLERIDGE 39 


romances, and relations of giants and magicians and 
genil? I know all that has been said against it; but I 
have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other 
way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. 
Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, 
through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to 
me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate 
nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little. 
And the universe to them is but a mass of little things. 
It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone 
to superstition by the former method ;—but are not the 
experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing 
any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, 
if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their 
favour? I have known some who have been rationally 
educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a micro- 
scopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, 
all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied 
(very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uni- 
formly put the negation of a power for the possession of 
a power, and called the want of imagination judgement, 
and the never being moved to rapture philosophy !’” 
Thus even as a boy Coleridge was emancipated from 
the bondage of the senses. By an inborn trait, by his 
peculiar genius, as well as by certain surrounding influ- 
ences, he was prepared to believe, and did believe, that 
reality was not bounded by what the ear can hear, or the 
eye see, or the hand touch. And his early belief in im- 
material or spiritual reality was nourished while he was 
still a boy in his ’teens by the study of Plato and the 
Neo-Platonists. Who that has read it can forget Lamb’s 
picture of Coleridge when they were school-fellows at 
Christ’s Hospital?—‘‘Come back into memory, like as 
thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like 
3 Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, Vol. I, pp. 16-17. 


40 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned 
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, 
Bard !—How have I seen the casual passer through the 
Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while 
he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the 
garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy 
deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, 
or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not 
pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer 
in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey 
Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity- 
boy!’’* 

Coleridge’s biographer, J. Dykes Campbell, regards 
Lamb’s words as substantially true, though he reminds 
us that there were probably Latin translations in the edi- 
tions of the Neo-Platonists used by Coleridge, and that 
Thomas Taylor’s translations appeared about this time; 
—‘‘difficult Greek transmuted into incomprehensible 
Hnglish,’’ Coleridge later remarked. It is not to be sup- 
posed, however, that, precocious though he was, he then 
had the capacity for any very serious reflexion upon his 
reading, or that he was led to it by any definite percep- 
tion of its contrast with contemporary thought. Rather, 
one supposes, he found it congenial he knew not why, 
and it nourished seeds which had been imperceptibly 
growing since his boyhood, but which were not yet ready 
to mature. 

This is the only supposition which makes it easy to 
account for the fact that a couple of years later, when 
Coleridge was at Cambridge, he was very ready to find 
Locke plausible and Hartley convincing. These writers, 
however, did not obtain the undivided sway over his mind 
that for a time they appeared to. Instead, they opened up 
a conflict, making him conscious that he was a born Pla- 

4 Elia, ‘‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago.’’ 


COLERIDGE 41 


tonist, and forcing him to the task, of critical reflexion. 
A mind less sensitive and acute than Coleridge’s might 
have rested not uncomfortably amidst contradictory be- 
liefs. Such confusion was, as has already been said, en- 
couraged by the condition of English thought in the 
eighteenth century. And at all times, indeed, so common 
is the mind divided against itself, the mind which is a 
mere unconcerned lodging-house for ideas no matter 
how heterogeneous or contradictory, that the phenome- 
non strikes many people as natural, and seems to call for 
no special explanation. But Coleridge’s mind was not of 
this order, and he could not comfortably range his new 
materialism beside the older Platonism of which it made 
him definitely conscious. The two lodgers made each 
other ill at ease; though materialism might seem irrefut- 
able, still, the belief in spiritual reality would not away. 
And the conflict thus originated is the source of all of 
Coleridge’s later thought. 

It was apparently in the period immediately following 
his final departure from Cambridge, in December, 1794, 
that Coleridge took to reading some of the Christian 
mystics, notably George Fox, Jacob Boehme, and Wil- 
liam Law. How he came to take up their works is not 
known. He was aware of their limitations, of the dangers 
in their mode of apprehension. Of Boehme he says, in the 
Biograpia Interaria, ‘‘Many, indeed, and gross were 
his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and ample 
occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor 
ignorant shoe-maker who had dared think for himself.’’ 
Yet underneath all extravagance or credulity, under- 
neath all mere ‘enthusiasm,’ Coleridge found in these 
outcasts from the close guild of the philosophers a mov- 
ing spirit, a living conviction of unmistakable and deep 
sincerity, which he felt practically constituted a self- 
authenticating assurance of the divine, of God’s reality 


42 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


and actual presence with his creatures of this world. And 
thus the writings of these mystics, as he says, ‘‘acted in, 
no slight degree to prevent my mind from being im- 
prisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic sys- 
tem. They contributed,’’ he continues, ‘‘to keep alive the 
heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and 
working presentiment, that all the products of the mere 
reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rat- 
tling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was 
yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not 
penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or 
shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke 
to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire 
throughout the night, during my wanderings through the 
wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without 
crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief.’’ Coleridge 
knew, as he says in a sentence immediately following this 
passage, that mysticism verged upon what he calls ‘‘an 
irreligious Pantheism,’’ yet he also says: ‘‘At no time 
could I believe that wn itself and essentially 1t is incom- 
patible with religion, natural or revealed.”’ 

What does this come to? The mystics, Coleridge says, 
gave him a ‘‘presentiment that all the products of the 
mere reflective faculty partook of death.’’ In other 
words, they suggested to him that the mind of man must 
after all be larger than Locke and Hume and Hartley 
had supposed. According to them the mind is entirely 
passive—the mere recipient of sensible impressions. On 
Hartley’s basis it is strictly resolvable into mechanical 
vibrations which we are deluded in regarding as some- 
thing different. But Coleridge came to feel that this was 
‘‘a wilful resignation of intellect’’ against which ‘‘human 
nature itself fought.’’ ‘‘How,’’ he asked, ‘‘can we make 
bricks without straw? Or build without cement?’’ And he 
answered that we do ‘‘learn all things indeed by occasion 


COLERIDGE 43 


of experience; but the very facts so learned force us in- 
ward on the antecedents that must be presupposed in 
order to render experience itself possible.’’ Consequently 
he was led to reflect that what we actually and immedi- 
ately know of our own experience, as soon as we proceed 
to examine it, shows us that an active power is there at 
work, an organizing centre which gives form and coher- 
ence to our sensible impressions. 

Thus Coleridge was led into the beginnings, at any 
rate, of a critical attitude towards the intellect. And the 
same attitude suggested also another line of reflexion. 
With respect to religion he concluded that ‘‘if the mere 
intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and 
intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstra- 
tion that no legitimate argument could be drawn from 
the intellect against its truth. And what is this,’’ he 
asked, ‘‘more than St. Paul’s assertion that by the 
powers of reasoning no man ever arrived at the knowl- 
edge of God?’’ And he adds, ‘‘I became convinced that 
religion . . . must have a moral origin; so far at least, 
that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths 
of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It 
were, therefore, to be expected that its fundamental truth 
would be such as might be denied; though only by the 
fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the hear 
alone!’’ : 

So it was that Coleridge arrived for himself at a point 
of view which is closely similar to that which Immanuel 
Kant achieved after Hume had awakened him from his 
dogmatic slumber. The data of consciousness forced the 
conclusion upon both of them, at any rate, that the mind 
actually did something, that it worked, that it was a 
species of self-activity. And for both the moral respon- 
sibility of the individual, which meant the free, origina- 
tive, in a sense creative, will of the individual, seemed an 


44 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ultimate postulate, to deny which was equivalent to the 
denial of human nature itself—equivalent in short to 
suicide. 

Kant, horridly arraying himself in a technical Jargon, 
and advancing his positions with the utmost caution and 
thoroughness, proceeded from this starting-point to work 
a veritable revolution in philosophy—a revolution which 
was completed, or some would say perverted, by Fichte, 
Schelling, and other followers. Kant’s most important 
works were published in the period from 1781 to 1794, 
but they remained for a considerable time, in common 
with German literature, practically unknown in England. 
As late as 1796 Coleridge only knew Kant as a metaphy- 
sician who had the reputation of being ‘‘most unintelli- 
gible.’? Of course, however, he and others more or less 
vaguely heard of stirrings of new life in thought and 
literature in Germany, and, at the same time, he appar- 
ently.came to something of a stand in his efforts to think 
through and resolve the contradiction between his ‘heart’ 
and his ‘head’—to use words which he himself chose on 
occasion to employ. Hence he naturally began to look 
towards Germany as a possible source of help. And in the 
fall of 1798, as soon as they had seen the Lyrical Ballads 
through the press, Coleridge and Wordsworth crossed 
the Channel and entered the unknown land. There Cole- 
ridge learned the language, talked to poets and read their 
poetry, began to write a life of Lessing, and gathered | 
together a small library composed chiefly of philosophi- 
cal works. He did not yet, however, undertake any real 
study of the new philosophy, and it was not until some 
time after the spring of 1801 that he began the serious 
reading of Kant. 

He has told in the Biographia Literaria how Kant at 
once took possession of him ‘‘with a giant’s hand,’’ and 
it is easy to see why. Kant had been concerned with the 


COLERIDGE 45 


same problem that he was, and had painfully and thor- 
oughly worked out his own solution of it. By his analysis 
of the mind he had conclusively demonstrated the inade- 
quacy alike of the dogmatic rationalism and of the scep- 
tical materialism of earlier thought and, at the same 
time, he had vindicated the rationality of those convic- 
tions regarding man’s spiritual nature which the mystics 
determinedly held but could not account for. Coleridge 
saw here the massive, systematie elaboration of the posi- 
tion at which he had already arrived for himself, and in 
particular he must have received with deep gratitude 
Kant’s distinction between the understanding and the 
reason. In later years he repeatedly acknowledged his 
debt to the ‘‘sage of Konigsberg,’’ as he called him. The 
nature of this indebtedness, however, has often been mis- 
understood, for Coleridge has been regarded as the mere 
carrier of the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling 
from Germany to England, and, not unnaturally, as an 
unsatisfactory, if not incompetent, interpreter. But it 
has already been shown that, as Coleridge’s closest and 
ablest student of recent years says, his debt to Kant was 
on the whole ‘‘more formal than material,’’ residing 
‘rather in the scientific statement of convictions pre- 
viously attained than in the acquisition of new truths.’’” 
Moreover, Coleridge could not accept Kant’s limitation 
of knowledge to the phenomenal world. He was ready to 
agree that this is the sphere of the understanding, and 
that the understanding cannot transcend it; but through 
the reason, he insisted, we do actually obtain knowledge 
of spiritual reality ‘‘by occasion of experience.’’ In other 
words, Coleridge maintained that Kant’s ideas of the 


5 J. Shawcross, in Introduction to his edition of Biographia Literaria, 
p- xli. I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Shaweross’s edition, 
without which the earlier portion of this essay could hardly have been 
written in its present form. 


46 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


pure reason are not merely regulative, but constitutive, 
and that his fundamental postulates arising from our 
moral nature-——God, immortality, and freedom—are not 
merely hypotheses, however necessary, but are realities 
given in moral experience. 

Thus, for all the help Kant gave him, Coleridge was 
_still left with the task of constructing his own religious 
philosophy.® Furthermore, the better one understands 
what that religious construction was to be the more 
readily will one credit Coleridge’s statement that ‘‘he 
had not gained any one great idea’’ from Fichte and 
Schelling.” I say what his religious construction was to 
be, rather than what it was, because unfortunately we 
have it only in the form of promises, forecasts, and frag- 
ments. Through the last twenty or more years of his life 
Coleridge considered that he was preparing himself for, 
or that he was making real progress with, his great book. 
This magnum opus was to gather together in systematic 
form the whole fabric of his thought and present to the 
world convincingly all he felt surging within him of 
assurance in the final truth of Christianity. But the mag- 
num opus was never committed to paper, and remains 
perhaps the most famous unwritten book in English 
literature. Something, indeed, that purported to be just 


6 And, as Mr. Shaweross is more particularly concerned to show, his own 
esthetic theory. 

7 Reported by Crabb Robinson, who also reports Coleridge as saying that 
‘to Kant his obligations are infinite, not so much from what Kant has 
taught him in the form of doctrine, as from the discipline gained in study- 
ing the great German philosopher. Coleridge is indignant at the low estima- 
tion in which the post-Kantianers affect to hold their master.’’ Later Cole- 
ridge also said to Robinson that ‘‘he adheres to Kant, notwithstanding all 
Schelling has written, and maintained that from the latter he has gained 
no new ideas. All Schelling has said, Coleridge has thought himself or 
found in Jacob Boehme.’’ J. Dykes Campbell, who quotes these passages 
in his biography of Coleridge, questions Robinson’s accuracy—needlessly, 
if the account given above is correct. 


COLERIDGE 47 


as good or almost as good was published in 1865 by 
Joseph Henry Green,* one of Coleridge’s devoted fol- 
lowers. Coleridge had left the completion of his system 
to Green as a sort of legacy or trust—a trust which Green 
took with deep seriousness, devoting the last thirty years 
of his life to preliminary studies and to the writing of his 
Spiritual Philosophy. But this, it is no disparagement to 
say, is not Coleridge’s magnum opus. The task, indeed, 
which Green piously and nobly undertook was an impos- 
sible one, and it is not his fault if we still have to go to 
Coleridge’s own work, fragmentary as it is, in any at- 
tempt to learn what it was he wished to say. 


Li 


CoLERIDGE was, in the first place, entirely at one with the 
empiricists in asserting that we learn all things by occa- 
sion of experience. He agreed also that the mere blind 
acquiescence in dogma imposed by authority, or, in other 
words, blind faith in the word of another human being, 
could lead to no good result whatever but, on the con- 
trary, could lead only to superstition and the hopeless 
deadening of our real selves. ‘‘If the mere acquiescence 
in truth, uncomprehended and unfathomed, were suffi- 
cient, few indeed would be the vicious and the miser- 
able,’’? he thought, considering how the number of pro- 
fessed believers far outweighed that of professed infi- 
dels. And he felt that this was the mistake both of Roman 
Catholics and of the Evangelical members of the Angli- 
ean Church in his own day—that both in differing ways 
erounded themselves simply on external authority. 

8 Green died before his work was published, and it was brought out 
under the editorial care of John Simon. J. Dykes Campbell says: ‘‘In his 
Hunterian Orations of 1840 and 1847, Green probably accomplished more 
in the setting forth of Coleridge’s philosophical views than in the Spiritual 


Philosophy.’’ 
9 Statesman’s Manual, in Bohn ed. of Biographia Literaria, p. 332. 


48 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


But this was, in plain words, a perversion of their 
Christianity. If, he asked, ‘‘acquiescence without insight ; 
if warmth without lght; if an immunity from doubt, 
given and guaranteed by a resolute ignorance; if the 
habit of taking for granted the words of a catechism, 
remembered or forgotten; if a mere sensation of positive- 
ness substituted—I will not say for the sense of cer- 
taimty; but—for that calm assurance, the very means and 
conditions of which it supersedes; if a belief that seeks 
the darkness, and yet strikes no root, immovable as the 
limpet from the rock, and like the limpet, fixed there by 
mere force of adhesion; if these suffice to make men 
Christians, in what sense could the apostle affirm that 
, believers receive, not indeed worldly wisdom, that comes 
to nought, but the wisdom of God, that we might know 
and comprehend the things that are freely given to us of 
God? On what grounds could he denounce sincerest fer- 
vour of spirit as defective, where it does not likewise 
bring forth fruits in the understanding?’ Coleridge 
wanted to strike down to the rock of knowledge for the 
foundation of his own religion, and this he was sure he 
‘ could not do save by reliance upon his own personal 
experience, through which must be given anything that 
he could call knowledge. In this he was true to the Eng- 
lish empirical tradition. 

But he quarrelled with the empiricists—with the ex- 
pounders of the ‘mechanical philosophy,’ as he called it 
—on the ground that they had not been true to their own 
principle. Both his own experience and the experiences 
of a host whom the world has agreed to count amongst 
its noblest characters assured him that the empiricists 
had arbitrarily denied some elements of experience for 
the sake of others. And thus they had opened themselves 


10 Aids to Reflexion, Bohn ed., p. 7. 


COLERIDGE ' 49 


to that reductio ad absurdum, that total denial of the 
possibility of rational certitude, at which Hume had ar- 
rived. They had arbitrarily denied that we may have a 
clear conception of anything which cannot be represented 
by a distinct image, and thus they had reduced the con- 
ceivable to the bounds of the picturable. They had fallen 
subject to ‘‘that despotism of the eye’’ from which 
Pythagoras and Plato had vainly sought to free man.” 

Yet actually as a matter of unmistakable experience, _ 
Coleridge contended, man does have a grasp of super!” 
sensible realities. If one of the simplest possible of cases 
be taken, we say that in all triangles the sum of any two 
sides must be greater than the third. But he points out 
that from experience alone we could not legitimately 
reach this conclusion. We could say only that all triangles 
we have hitherto measured have exhibited this character- 
istic, and consequently—if we have measured a great 
many of them—that there is a strong probability that all 
triangles always will do so. Whence then the certitude 
we do feel? Using the terms of a now antiquated psy- 
chology, Coleridge replies that the mind has more than 
one faculty, that it is the understanding only which gen- 
eralizes from sensible impressions—whereas we are also 
equipped with reason. And reason supersedes the whole 
process of empirical observation. ‘‘On the first concep- 
tion presented by the understanding in consequence of 
the first sight of a triangular figure, of whatever sort it 
might chance to be, it affirms with an assurance incapable 
of future increase, with a perfect certainty, that in all 
possible triangles any two of the enclosing lines will and 
must be greater than the third. In short, understanding 
in its highest form of experience remains commensurate 
with the experimental notices of the senses from which it 


11 Biographia Literaria, Bohn ed., pp. 1385 and 52. 


50 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


is generalized. Reason, on the other hand, either prede- 
termines experience, or avails itself of a past experience 
to supersede its necessity in all future time; and affirms 
truths which no sense could perceive, nor experiment 
verify, nor experience confirm.’’” 

Reason, then, ‘‘is the power of universal and necessary 
convictions, the source and substance of truths above 
sense, and having their evidence in themselves.’’ In its 
mode of apprehension reason ‘‘is much nearer to sense 
than to understanding; for reason is a direct aspect of 
truth, an inward beholding, having a similar relation to 
the intelligible or spiritual as sense has to the material 
or phenomenal.’’ Reason is an ‘‘intuition or immediate 
beholding, accompanied by a conviction of the necessity 
and universality of the truth so beholden not derived 
from the senses, which intuition, when it is construed by 
pure sense gives birth to the science of mathematics, and 
when applied to objects supersensuous or spiritual is the 
organ of theology and philosophy.’’* 

But Coleridge quarrelled further with the expounders 
of the mechanical philosophy because, in obedience to the 
inexorable demands of their theory, they denied the free- 
dom of the will. Dr. Johnson’s familiar words concerning 
this famous controversy are that all theory is against the 
will’s freedom, while all experience is for it. Coleridge 
of course was in full agreement with the latter half of 
this statement, but was far from agreeing with the 
former half. For he considered that any theory which 
denied the will’s freedom denied human nature itself, 
and was in reality completely unintelligible when con- 
fronted with the testimony of actual experience. In other 
words, whatever difficulties were solved by necessitarian- 
ism, they were far fewer and less important than the diffi- 


12 Aids to Reflexion, p. 154. 
13 [bid., pp. 143, 148, and 155. 


COLERIDGE 51 


culties which necessitarianism raised. Coleridge did not 
suppose that he could prove or demonstrate the existence 
of a free will, or of an originative, creative power in man, 
any more than one can prove the axioms of geometry or 
the premises of the materialist and necessitarian. All 
sciences begin in postulates or assumptions or axioms— 
in truths taken to be self-evident. Coleridge simply took 
the free will to be the basic axiom of personality. If man’ 
has no free will he is no longer a person, but a thing. 
And this is just what the necessitarian asks one to take 
for granted, to take as his axiom. He of course does not 
prove the non-existence of a free will—for this is one of 
the things that can neither be proved nor be disproved— 
but, as Coleridge puts it, ‘‘he desires you only to take 
for granted that all reality is included in nature, and he 
may then safely defy you to ward off his conclusion— 
that nothing is excluded!’’ Coleridge puts it in this way 
because he recognizes that ‘‘whatever is comprised in the 
chain and mechanism of cause and effect’’ is of course 
necessitated, has ‘‘its necessity in some other thing, 
antecedent or concurrent,’’ and ‘‘this is said to be natu- 
ral; and the aggregate and system of all such things is 
Nature. It is, therefore, a contradiction in terms to in- 
elude in this the free will, of which the verbal definition 
is—that which originates an act or state of being. In this 
sense, therefore,’’ he concluded, ‘‘spiritual and super- 
natural are synonymous.’’** 

Coleridge declares that in this the only difference be- 
tween his procedure and that of the geometricians is 
that, while ‘‘the postulates of geometry no man can deny,’ 
those of moral science are such as no good man will deny. 
For it is not in our power to disclaim our nature as sen- 
tient beings; but it is in our power to disclaim our pre- 
rogative as moral beings.’’ And this difference is bound 

14 Aids to Reflexion, pp. 91 and 42, 


52 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


up with our very conception of duty. Thus he assumes, he 
says, ‘‘a something the proof of which no man can give 
to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any 
man assert that he cannot find it, 1 am bound to disbe- 
lieve him. I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the 
very foundations of my own moral nature. For I either 
find it as an essential of the humanity common to him and 
me, or I have not found it at all, except as an hypochon- 
driast finds glass legs.’’ Coleridge also regards as a self- 
evident fact of consciousness the reality of the law of 
conscience, and as a self-evident fact of history the exist- 
ence of evil—‘‘of evil essentially such, not by accident of 
outward circumstances, not derived from its physical 
consequences, nor from any cause out of itself.’’* 
These, I should say, are the bases of Coleridge’s reli- 
gious thought, about which we must be clear if it 1s to be 
understood. He then went on, after distinguishing the 
reason from the understanding, to distinguish two as- 
pects of the reason, ‘‘derived from the different modes of 
applying it and from the objects to which it is directed.’’ 
This is hinted at in a passage which I have already 
quoted. Coleridge’s terms are those used by Kant, but 
the meaning he attaches to them is his own. He terms 
the reason speculative in relation to formal principles 
or abstract truth, ‘‘but in reference to actual, or moral, 
truth,’’ he says, ‘‘as the fountain of ideas and the light 
of conscience, we name it the practical reason.’’ And the 
latter, the practical reason, alone is reason, he contends, 
‘‘in the full and substantive sense. It is reason in its own 
sphere of perfect freedom, as the source of ideas, which 
ideas in their conversion to the responsible will become 
ultimate ends.’’ While the theoretic or speculative reason, 
he thinks, ‘‘is rather the light of reason in the under- 


15 Aids to Reflexion, pp. 89 and 90. 


COLERIDGE 53 


standing.’”* According to this it is only by responsible 
acts in obedience to the law of conscience that we can 
realize absolute truth in its fulness and reality—but in 
such acts we do realize it, in such acts we really are in 
living communion with God. 

This bars the speculative reason from any positive 
office in theology, though not from a negative one. ‘‘Do 
I,’’? Coleridge asks, ‘‘utterly exclude the speculative 
reason from theology? No! It is its office and rightful 
privilege to determine on the negative truth of whatever 
we are required to believe. The doctrine must not con- 
tradict any universal principle; for this would be a doc- 
trine that contradicted itself. Or philosophy? No. It may 
be and has been the servant and pioneer of faith by con- 
vineing the mind that a doctrine is cogitable, that the soul 
can present the Idea to itself, and that if we determine 
to contemplate, or think of, the subject at all, so and in 
no other form can this be effected. So far are both logic 
and philosophy to be received and trusted. But the duty, 
and in some cases and for some persons even the right, 
of thinking on subjects beyond the bounds of sensible 
experience; the grounds of the real truth; the life, the 
substance, the hope, the love, in one word the faith— 
these are derivatives from the practical, moral, and 
Spiritual nature and being of man.’’” 

By responsible acts, then, and by these alone in obedi- 
ence to the law of conscience do we come into communion » 
with God, and so realize the divine nature in our present 
selves. But, as has been said, Coleridge also postulates. 
as a fact of historic experience the existence of evil—‘‘of 
a law in the nature of man resisting the law of God.”’ 
This he holds to be a mystery—a problem, that is, ‘of 
which any other solution than the statement of the fact 


16 Aids to Reflexion, pp. 143 and 277. 
17 [bid., pp. 122-123. 


o4 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


itself is demonstrably impossible.’ And that it is so fol- 
lows from the fact, if it be granted as such, that we are 
responsible beings. ‘‘For this is the essential attribute 
of a will, and contained in the very idea, that whatever 
determines the will/acquires this power from a previous 
determination of the will itself. The will is ultimately 
self-determined, or it is no longer a will under the law of 
perfect freedom, but a nature under the mechanism of 
cause and effect. And if by an act to which it had deter- 
mined itself, it has subjected itself to the determination 
of nature (in the language of St. Paul, to the law of the 
flesh), it receives a nature into itself and so far it be- 
comes a nature; and this is a corruption of the will and a 
corrupt nature. It is also a fall of man, inasmuch as his 
will is the condition of his personality—the ground and 
condition of the attribute which constitutes him man.’’ 
And further: ‘‘A moral evil is an evil that has its origin 
in a will. An evil common to all must have a ground 
common to all. But the actual existence of moral evil we 
are bound in conscience to admit; and that there is an 
evil common to all is a fact; and this evil must therefore 
have a common ground. Now this evil cannot originate 
in the divine will; it must therefore be referred to the 
will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin.’’** 
Coleridge regards this term as really a pleonasm, for if 
sin be not original, that is, originated within the will, it 
would not be sin;—‘‘a state or act that has not its origin 
in the will may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mis- 
chief; but a sin it cannot be.’ | 
Coleridge’s treatment of original sin, which I have 
outlined as far as possible in his own words, may be taken 
as a fair example of his method of treating the whole 
body of Christian dogma, or of the way in which he felt 


18 Aids to Reflexion, pp. 189, 190, 192. 
19 [bid., p. 178. 


COLERIDGE D9 


confident it could be treated. The method consists in the 
resolution of a given dogma into those terms of personal 
experience from which in the beginning, as he supposes, 
it took its rise. It has been believed by very many, per- 
haps by most, that original sin means hereditary guilt. 
But this Coleridge terms a ‘‘monstrous fiction,’’ and he 
agrees with all the professed infidels who have regarded 
it as a revolting and essentially immoral conception. For 
him the dogma simply expresses a fact of individual 
experience, undeniably common to all human beings. It 
- is not, then, the bald statement of a mystery beyond 
reason which we are directed blindly to accept, nor is it 
an historic fact external to ourselves transmitted to us 
only by heredity, though in the Biblical story of the fall 
of our first parents it is symbolically expressed in the 
garb of history. On the contrary, it is a present fact in 
the lives of all human beings, with a meaning which can 
be realized through the practical reason. And so it is with 
\the Redemption, with the Trinity, with the whole body of 
doctrines which make up the sum of Christian belief. All 
have their rational meaning, according to Coleridge, in 
relation to the facts of personal experience. And in order 
that any one may realize that meaning in his own life he 
has only to exercise his will in moral action so as to dis- 
cover the saving truth through his practical reason. 
Thus, as he regards it, Christianity is the rationale of 
life; it is, he says, ‘‘the perfection of human intelli- 
gence.’’? He does not deny, of course, that there may be 
speculative difficulties in the tenets peculiar to Chris- 
tianity. He imagines some one saying, How can I com- 
prehend them? How are they to be proved? And he an- 
swers, to the first question, ‘‘Christianity is not a theory, 
or a speculation, but a Life;—not a philosophy of life, ‘ 
but a life and a living process. To the second: T'ry it.’”° 
20 Aids to Reflexion, pp. xvi, 134. | 


~ 


56 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


By this he means simply that Christian doctrine, if given 
an opportunity in the only possible way, will prove itself 
true. In other words, Christian doctrine is merely a 
formal statement of what is in reality the deliverance of 
man’s practical reason, or of the responsible will acting © 
in obedience to the law of conscience. And in the con- 
cluding paragraph of the Biographa Literaria he says 
that his desire has been to show ‘‘that the scheme of 
Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our 
Church, though not discoverable by human reason [2.e., 
speculative reason], 1s yet in accordance with it; that link 
follows link by necessary consequence; that religion 
passes out of the ken of reason only where the eye of 
reason has reached its own horizon; and that faith is 
then but its continuation: even as the day softens away 
into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breath- 
less, steals into the darkness.’’ 

_ Coleridge sought to rest his exposition of Christianity 

from beginning to end on experience—not on some other 
person’s experience, but for himself on his own experi- 
ence, and for others on theirs. This is what religion was 
for him: an inner experience of the individual, expressed 
outwardly in a way of life, in action. Its only test, he 
thought, was the individual’s actual and adequate trial 
of it. ‘‘Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight 
which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be 
the reward of that belief.’’* And of course for him reli- 
gion meant Christianity; it meant, as he sometimes said, 
all the beliefs held in common by the leaders of the 
Protestant Reformation, or, as he said at other times, 
the doctrines embodied in the homilies and liturgy of the 
Anglican Church. He objected against the deists that they 
substituted a colourless abstraction, a mere speculative 
concept, for the one true and living God—‘‘as if the 

21 Table Talk and Omniana, Oxford ed., p. 404. 


COLERIDGE 57 


main object of religion were to solve difficulties for the 
satisfaction of the intellect.’’ ‘‘In religion,’’ he added, 
‘‘there is no abstraction.’’” To his mind it was at once 
the glory and the substantiating testimony of Christian- 
ity that it did express completely the insight into the 
nature of life gained from moral action originated by the 
free will. Tried, it was not found wanting; it did unlock 
the meaning of life; its peculiar doctrines did sum up 
as far as words could that ‘‘total act of the soul,’’ that 
absorption of the whole man in the being of God, which 
was religion true and undefiled. 

Coleridge maintained the same attitude towards the 
Bible as towards the articles of Christian belief. Several 
years after his death was published his Confessions of an 
Inquring Spirit, in which he endeavoured to distinguish 
between ‘‘the right and the superstitious use’’ of the 
Bible. He declared that he could accept all of the articles 
of belief elaborated by the Protestant reformers except 
one. This exceptionable doctrine was that of ‘‘the divine 
origin and authority of all and every part of the Canoni- 
eal Books’’ of the Bible—a doctrine which required the 
belief that every word of the sacred volume ‘‘was—not 
alone inspired by, that is, composed by men under the 
actuating influence of the Holy Spirit, but likewise—dic- 
tated by an Infallible Intelligence;—that the writers, 
each and all, were divinely informed as well as in- 
spired.’’?* 

This doctrine, he said, planted the vineyard of the 
Word with thorns for him and placed snares in its path- 
ways. He admitted that in this he might be suffering, 
from the delusions of an evil spirit, but added that before 
he harshly questioned the seeming angel of light—that is, 

22 Statesman’s Manual, Bohn ed. of Biographia Literaria, pp. 353, 354. 


23 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Bohn ed. of Aids to Reflexion, 
p: 296. 


58 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


his reason and his moral sense conjoined with all his 
clearest knowledge—which bade him reject the doctrine 
of the verbal inspiration of the Bible, he would inquire 
into the authority on which this doctrine rested. And his 
inquiry resulted in his condemnation of the doctrine as 
both superstitious and unscriptural. Whether for his 
reasons or for others, to-day so many accept his conclu- 
sion that we need hardly follow with him through his 
treatment of the question. Nowadays an overwhelming 
number would echo him when he asks: ‘‘ How can abso- 
lute infallibility be blended with fallibility? Where is the 
infallible criterion? How can infallible truth be infallibly 
conveyed in defective and fallible expressions?’’ And 
similar agreement will be felt with his assertion that he 
condemns the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the 
Scriptures just because he does prize and revere them 
for the truth they do contain. Why should I disbelieve 
this doctrine? he says. Because it ‘‘petrifies at once the 
whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies and 
symmetrical gradations—the flexile and the rigid—the 
supporting hard and the clothing soft—the blood which 
is the life—the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely 
woven, but soft and springy, cellular substance in which 
all are embedded and lightly bound together. This breath- 
ing organism, this glorious panharmonicon, which I had 
seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man’s voice 
given to it, the Doctrine in question turns at once into 
a colossal Memnon’s head, a hollow passage for a voice, 
a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks 
in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same ;— 
and no man uttered it and never in a human heart was 
it conceived.’’** In short, he felt that the doctrine of 
plenary inspiration removed the Bible at one blow from 
the circle of humanity and robbed it of all significant con- 
24 Confessions, u.s., pp. 299, 305. 


COLERIDGE 59 


nexion with us and our concerns. The doctrine external- 
ized the Bible and made of it in effect a cheat and a delu- 
sion, for this doctrine declared the Bible to be something 
the nature of which no man could possibly understand. 

But, said Coleridge, when I read the Bible as far as 
possible in the same way that I read any other book, 
when I contemplate it as a record of the reflexions and 
experiences of men like myself, striving like myself for 
the truth which giveth life, then I discover that there is in 
it ‘‘more that finds me than I have experienced in all 
other books put together; that the words of the Bible 
find me at greater depths of my being; and that whatever 
finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its 
having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.’ 

Thus he consistently asked of the Bible what he asked 
of the articles of Christian belief, that it should prove 
itself. The Bible commanded his assent just so far as it 
did this by arousing an answering voice within him, and 
no further. He of course recognized that where the Bible 
spoke to him in vain the fault might lie within himself, 
and he accordingly concluded that, if at any time he 
should find a discord between the living spirit within 
him and the written letter, he should not straightway 
decide that the Bible was in the wrong of it. But on the 
other hand neither, he said, ‘‘will I fall under the con- 
demnation of them that would lie for God, but seek as I 
may, be thankful for what I have—and wait.’’*° 

He regarded the Bible, then, as much as possible in the 
same way that he regarded any other book. He regarded 
it as literature ;—but it is of some importance that what 
this meant to him should be made clear. A piece of litera- 
ture may be either a history or a fiction, and if the latter 
it may or may not be an allegory, but it was something 


25 Confessions, u.s., p. 296. 
26 [bid., p. 294. 


60 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


still different that Coleridge saw in the Bible. It was, he 
thought, amongst the miseries of his age that it recog- 
nized no medium between literal and metaphorical, 
whereas such a medium the Bible really was. ‘‘Faith,’’ 
he says, ‘‘is either to be buried in the dead letter or its 
name and honours usurped by a counterfeit product of 
the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of 
self-complacency confounds symbols with allegories. Now 
an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into 
a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstrac- 
tion from objects of the senses; the principal being more 
worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsub- 
stantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other 
hand a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the 
special in the individual, or of the general in the special, 
or of the universal in the general;—above all. by the 
translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. 
It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelli- 
gible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as 
a living part in that unity of which it is the representa- 
tive!" 

Coleridge had a definite object in view in attempting 
to make this distinction, the essential point in which is 
that the symbol ‘‘always partakes of the reality which it 
renders intelligible.’’ Thus the life of Christ came to him 
~ as a revelation, indeed, in just the sense in which we 
often say that some poem or picture is a revelation to us, 
meaning that there is some magic in it which touches our 
inmost being and suddenly commands an assent from us 
which is an act of our whole personality—feeling and 
thought united or fused for the moment into an unex- 
plainable yet unmistakable, profound certitude. Such a 
revelation the life of Christ was to him, but the symbol 
‘‘always partakes of the reality which it renders intelli- 

27 Statesman’s Manual, Bohn ed. of Biographia Literaria, p- 322. 


COLERIDGE 61 


gible,’’? and hence he also asserted the life of Christ to 
be an historic revelation which conscience bids us accept 
as such, and gave his assent to Christianity as an historic 
religion in the orthodox sense of those words. 


It was thus by means of his definition of a symbol that ‘ 


he was enabled to use the word revelation in two senses 
of the same object, and so was enabled in the end to em- 
brace the same Christianity as did those who received it 
simply as an external, historic revelation. He defines this 
double aspect of religion in a concluding paragraph of 
the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: ‘‘I comprise and 
conclude the sum of my conviction in this one sentence. 
Revealed religion (and I know of no religion not re- 
vealed) is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is, 
the identity or co-inherence, of Subjective and Objective. 
It is in itself, and irrelatively, at once inward life and 
truth, and outward fact and luminary. But as all power 
manifests itself in the harmony of correspondent oppo- 
sites, each supposing and supporting the other—so has 
religion its objective, or historic and ecclesiastical pole, 
and its subjective, or spiritual and individual pole. In the 
miracles, and miraculous parts of religion—both in the 
first communication of divine truths, and in the promul- 
gation of the truths thus communicated—we have the 
union of the two, that is, the subjective and supernatural 
displayed objectively—outwardly and anus ao 
subjective and supernatural.”’ 


DET 


Sucu was Coleridge’s progression from the period when 
he ‘‘sported infidelity’’ after reading Voltaire, and when 
he was a materialist and necessitarian after the manner 
of Hartley, to a complete acceptance of Christianity as 
set forth in the liturgy and homilies of the Anglican 


f% 


62 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Church and as an historic revealed religion. This last 
stage in his progression is significant in showing the 
completeness of his repudiation of eighteenth-century 
rationalism and scepticism, but it is overshadowed in 
importance by his method of reaching full acceptance of 
historic Christianity. He did so not in obedience to any 
external authority, whether of a book or of a church, but 
by exercising the ‘right and duty of private judgement.’ 
He saw glimmering through moral experience ‘phantoms 
of sublimity,’ lessons which could be stated only in terms 
of Christian doctrine. Such experience was a real, indeed 
a central, fact of life, yet it was unintelligible unless so 
explained—while the materialists and necessitarians for 
the sake of their doctrine perforce had to deny this whole 
tract of experience. 

Coleridge was deeply read in English divinity of the 
seventeenth century, and he was also impressed by the 
evidences of sensibility or pietism which followed in the 
wake of the narrow rationalism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Thus he was nourished by both branches of Protes- 
tant individualism. The mystics encouraged him to trust 
his religious feelings, while the Cambridge Platonists 
and other Protestant writers of the seventeenth century 
encouraged him to believe that these were susceptible of 
rational interpretation. It was this which he strove for 
through the later years of his life—the convincing dem- 
onstration of the objective validity of his beliefs. H. D. 
Traill, in the life of Coleridge in the series of ‘‘English 
Men of Letters,’’ quotes a sentence which sums up what 
he calls ‘‘the great Coleridgean position’’: ‘‘Christianity, 
rightly understood, is identical with the highest philoso- 
phy, and apart from all question of historical evidence, 
the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and 
eternal truths of reason—truths which man, by the vouch- 
safed light of Nature and without aid from documents 


COLERIDGE 63 


or tradition, may always and anywhere discover from 
himself.’’ 

This might almost have been written by Toland or by 
Tindal, yet Coleridge was in no danger of reverting to 
deism in his attempt to revive Christianity. He was not 
seeking an argument which should demonstrate the pro- 
priety of religious belief, but an explanation of his own 
undeniable experience. That experience was the highest 
and fullest reality of his own life. His effort was not to 
discover some objective ground for belief, but to vindi- 
cate philosophically what, for himself, he already knew 
unmistakably.” 

Yet he failed in his effort. One reason for his failure 
was personal. The reading of his prose is generally re- 
garded as no light task, but there is also a certain real 
painfulness in it. For the trouble is not only that Cole- 
ridge’s thought is abstruse, but that he was never in 
complete control of his faculties. He was an inveterate 
fumbler, reaching uncertainly for the truth he wished to 
express, and helpless in the face of every by-path sug- 
gested by his exposition. What he found in those by-paths 
nearly always has its interest, sometimes its absorbing 
interest, but it did not help him to reach his goal. And 


28T have not attempted to reproduce Mr. Shaweross’s luminous exposi- 
tion of the dependence of poetic creation upon moral experience as this was 
first clearly revealed to Coleridge through one of Wordsworth’s poems. This 
started Coleridge in his attempt to distinguish the imagination from the 
fancy—a distinction corresponding to that between the reason and the 
understanding. The experience aided him to see natural objects as the 
creation of God, which could speak to us symbolically of spiritual realities 
when we brought to their contemplation that joyful disposition which is the 
fruit of moral activity. But the same natural objects, he found, remained 
mute unless we were in a state of harmony with their meaning. In the light 
of Mr. Shawcross’s comment Dejection becomes, to the student of his 
thought, the most significant of Coleridge’s poems. And his experience of 
the influence of natural objects upon the reason, while to the understanding 
they remained merely a mass of little things, seemed to give additional 
ground for seeing an objectively valid meaning in moral activity. 


64 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


his repeated, vain struggles to get forward to what is 
really central are pitiable, and painful merely to watch. 

Carlyle says in his Life of Sterling that Coleridge’s 
path on a garden walk was that of a cork-screw; he could 
.. never make up his mind which side of the walk to stay 
on, and so perpetually seesawed, back and forth. It was 
much the same with his talk. Carlyle has remarkably 
described that talk as he heard it at Highgate, where 
Coleridge in his old age was accustomed to discourse 
almost as an oracle to a group of younger men, of whom 
John Sterling was for a time one. ‘‘No talk,’’ says Car- 
lyle, ‘‘in his century or in any other, could be more sur- 
prising. . . . It was talk not flowing anywhither like a 
river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable cur- 
rents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly defi- 
cient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelli- 
sibility ; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly 
or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. 
So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near 
to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading 
out boundless as if to submerge the world... . . He began 
anywhere: you put some question to him, made some sug- 
gestive observation: instead of answering this, or de- 
cidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accu- 
mulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, 
transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary 
and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at 
last get under way—but was swiftly solicited, turned 
aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this 
hand or that, into new courses; and ever into new; and 
before long into all the Universe, where it was uncertain 
what game you would catch, or whether any. . . . Glori- 
ous islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they 
were few, and soon swallowed in the general element 
again. Balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and the 


COLERIDGE 65 


intelligible. . . . Eloquent artistically expressive words 
you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle in- 
sight came at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, 
recognizable as pious though strangely coloured, were 
never wanting long: but in general you could not call 
this aimless, cloudcapt, cloud-based, lawlessly meander- 
ing human discourse of reason by the name of ‘excellent 
talk,’ but only of ‘surprising’; and were reminded bit- 
terly of Hazlitt’s account of it: ‘Excellent talker, very— 
if you let him start from no premises and come to no 
conclusion.’ ”’ 

Carlyle evidently indulged his love of humorous exag- 
. geration when he wrote these words, and for that allow- 
ance must be made. It has been suggested also that one 
reason for the unkindness in his tone was the fact that 
he too was a talker, whereas Coleridge suffered no inter- 
ruptions. Unfortunately no one who knows Carlyle can 
dismiss this suggestion lightly; and there is additional 
ground for concluding that it was not altogether Cole- 
ridge’s fault that his auditor could not grasp his mean- 
ing. But, despite these abatements, no reader of Cole- 
ridge’s prose can fail to recognize the picture, and there 
is a pathos in it which even Carlyle’s hardness cannot 
obseure. Coleridge would hardly have succeeded had his 
task been an easier one. His strength lay not in rigorous, 
systematic thought pursued without deviation to its fur- 
thest reach; it lay rather in moments of sudden insight, 
in fugitive glimpses of the ‘phantoms of sublimity.’ And 
circumstances not only of temperament, but of misfor- 
tune, of ill-health, of unhappiness prolonged and irre- 
mediable, all conspired to place a burden upon him which 
might well have been too great for a more phlegmatic 
person and which inevitably sapped his powers as it 
weakened his character. 

Moreover, Coleridge’s task was not only difficult, it 


66 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


was in its fulness impossible. He was dazzled, as many 
still are and are long likely to be, by the immemorial pre- 
tensions of both philosophers and religious apologists to 
symmetry, completeness, and finality in their systems. 
He was confident of the wrongness of the system he op- 
posed, but he felt its strength and had himself been cap- 
tured for a time by its superficial plausibility ; he wanted 
to confront it with a system equally symmetrical, com- 
plete, and final. He saw as clearly as any one all the 
dangers of making mere uncontrolled feeling or inarticu- 
late stubborn conviction the guide of life, and he had ever 
before him the confidence of seventeenth-century English 
theologians in the rational nature of Christianity when 
they were confronted with anarchic wild ‘enthusiasm.’ 
In addition, nineteenth-century criticism of the Bible and 
historical research into the origins of Christianity and 
“into the general development of the religions of the 
earth had scarcely begun at the time when he was form- 
ing what came to be his life-long intention or hope. It 
was thus natural, perhaps inevitable, that he should have 
conceived his task as he did, but it was nevertheless in 
its fulness an impossible undertaking. It would have 
required irrefutable proof that miraculous revelations 
recorded in the Bible and the essential dogmas of Chris- 
tianity are necessary elements in any intelligible account 
of human nature; and it would also have required irre- 
futable proof that these historic revelations and their 
formulation into dogmas are direct communications, in 
human terms, from a Spiritual Being who is the creator 
of the universe in the likeness of his own nature. It is 
hardly needful to add to these major requirements others 
which follow from them. Apart from the questions they 
raise on the side of history, they demand, unfortunately, 
a vast extension of certitude from its basis in experience 
—an extension, indeed, which that basis cannot support, 


COLERIDGE 67 


since we are raised into regions of absolute spirituality 
where, at the most, as long as we remain human we can 
only say that one man’s guess or another’s must be some- 
thing like the truth. 

Yet Coleridge’s failure to accomplish his task, his fail- 
ure even to visualize that task consistently and definitely, 
ought not to obscure the significance and value of what 
he did do. John Stuart Mill, descendant and representa- 
tive of the ‘mechanical’ philosophers though he was, still 
saw in Coleridge one of ‘‘the two great seminal minds 
of England’’ in the opening years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; and he did so because he recognized that Coleridge 
spoke, imperfectly, yes, but imperatively and truly for a 
side of human nature and a corresponding aspect of 
reality for which his own philosophy could find no room. 
Mill saw in Coleridge’s ‘attempt to arrive at theology by 
way of philosophy much straining, and most frequently 
total failure.’ Yet, none the less, he valued Coleridge just 
because he did seek to revive and re-establish that esti- 
mate of life which Christianity has managed by one 
means or another to conserve and hand down through the 
generations of men. Mill perceived that there was truth 
in Coleridge’s distinction between the understanding and 
the reason; that, in other words, through moral activity 
we may really rise to a direct apprehension of an organiz- 
ing and connecting spiritual principle which gives unity 
and meaning to life and experience, and which cannot be 
apprehended through the work of the understanding, 
through the observation and classification of phenomena. 

Mill’s estimate is certainly of high significance; yet it 
may be remembered that Carlyle, who should have sym- 
pathized with Coleridge’s aims even if he could not fully 
understand them, said mockingly that the sage of High- 
gate had discovered ‘‘the sublime secret of believing by . 
the reason what the understanding had been obliged to 


68 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


fling out as incredible.’’ Moreover, it is undeniable that 
Coleridge’s great and perhaps still active influence upon 
English theology has practically tended in this direction. 
But Coleridge cannot be blamed for the well-meant eva- 
sions and sophistries of men who have followed after 
him, and who have attempted, not to spread abroad and 
strengthen his high achievement, but rather to carry for- 
ward and uphold his chimerical aspirations. And in Cole- 
ridge’s own case it is safe to say that the better one 
knows him the less can one doubt his complete sincerity 
and honesty of intention. He may be taken, moreover, 
alike in what he accomplished and in what he failed to 

“accomplish as a true index of what it was possible at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century to do in the direction 
of reviving Christianity on Protestant lines. 

In proportion as we rightly understand him we are 
bound, it seems to me, to think of him with feelings ap- 
proaching veneration. He is a painful figure to contem- 
plate, but the truer emblem of humanity for that—hu- 
manity with all its deep confusion of grandeur and 
misery bared relentlessly to sight. He was a good man 
of noble genius, yet helplessly irresolute. In his writing 
and in his talk exactly as in his life he wandered vaguely, 
caught in the net of his own images and words, unable 
to beat himself clear. In belief as in action he went widely 
astray in the world’s labyrinth; yet never did he give 
up, but always returned again and again to the attack 
with a sort of bewildered yet undaunted courage. He saw 
deeply, he felt intensely, he had a profound, immediate 
assurance of certitude; and he is still able to move his 
readers strangely, making them too feel on occasion his 
own assurance that the truth is with him, making them 
feel also that they are in contact with a high and serious 
nature whose words they will take lightly at their own 
peril. And we see in hin, at the last, one who, amidst 


COLERIDGE 69 


powerful and determined opposition around him and 
even within him, did yet remain faithful to the highest 
experience of humankind, holding fast to the conviction 
that human lite zs significant, that it does have a spiritual 
meaning beyond and above the activity of the senses, and 
a meaning which the processes of the exact sciences can- 
not fathom. 


IIT. 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 


BretwEeEN Newman and Coleridge there are many resem- 
blances, many contrasts. Strikingly alike in certain in- 
born qualities of temperament, they both dedicated them- 
selves to the renewal of a living Christianity. And their 
efforts to establish the validity of Christian belief fol- 
lowed, up to a certain point, so much the same line that 
at least one contemporary in the spring of 1834 supposed 
that Newman was a disciple of Coleridge. In this he was 
wrong, as Newman never even read any of Coleridge’s 
works until the spring of 1835, but he was then at once 
struck with the resemblance, and wrote: ‘‘I am surprised 
how much I thought mine, is to be found there.’’ Accord- 
ingly when, in 1839, he was writing about the origins and 
progress of the Oxford Movement he credited Coleridge 
with a share in the preparation of the public mind for 
the reception of ‘‘Catholic truth.’’ 

It is consequently not surprising that Carlyle was as 
contemptuous of Newman as he was of Coleridge—New- 
man, he said, had not the intellect of a moderate-sized 
rabbit.* Yet it is a fact that those faults for which Carlyle 
castigated Coleridge, his mistiness or cloudiness, his un- 
intelligibility, his vague purposelessness, his rambling 
expansiveness, Newman did not share with him. This 
contrast, indeed, is the first thing that strikes any reader 
who turns from the one to the other. No praise can be 
too high for Newman’s unmatched style, for the noble, 


1 Carlyle’s Life in London, J. A. Froude, II, 247. 


ane: 


_ 


CARDINAL NEWMAN (al 


severely controlled fire of his utterance, for his clarity, 
his definiteness, and his purposiveness. His primacy 
amongst Hinglish prose-writers of the nineteenth century 
is, of course, merely the outer mark of a deeper-lying 
difference between the two men, a difference ultimately 
of character. While Coleridge’s high-mindedness and 
insight were perpetually and often vainly struggling 
against irreconcilable foes within him, Newman’s charac- 
ter was straight and sound and resolute. It was more. 
He is now recognized as the greatest figure in English 
religious life of the nineteenth century not alone because 
he exerted a profound and abiding influence upon both 
the Anglican Church and the Catholic, but also because 
his character was at once manly and saintly, while it had 
as its ready instruments a rich imagination and a power- 
ful intellect. 

Newman was almost thirty years younger than Cole- 
ridge. He was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. 


‘Like Coleridge, he was apparently born with an unusual 


sense, or conviction, of immaterial reality. As a child he 
lived naively in a world of real or fancied spiritual influ- 
ences. He says: ‘‘I used to wish the Arabian Tales were 
true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on 
magical powers, and talismans. . . . I thought life might 
be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, 
my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing them- 
selves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of 
a material world.’’”? He was, as he says, a superstitious 
youngster. He used to cross himself on going into the 
dark. In later years he could not recollect how he had 
come by this practice, nor what meaning it had had for 
him; but it seems evident that, however it is to be ac- 
counted for, even at this early time he felt a connatural 


2 Apologia pro Vita Sua, Oxford ed., pp. 105-106. Succeeding quotations 
are from this volume unless another is mentioned in the text or in a note. 


72 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


sympathy for certain religious symbols. And all his 
reminiscences of his childhood go together to testify that 
from his earliest days he lived in the consciousness of a 
world beyond the world of sensible experiences to which 
he felt himself linked by the most real chains. 

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think of 


/him as escaping the influences which had made Coleridge 


for a time a materialist and necessitarian. As a youth 
he read Thomas Paine, Hume, Voltaire; and during his 
undergraduate days he carefully studied the works of 
Gibbon and of Locke. It has sometimes been said that 
Newman’s career can be very simply explained in terms 
of his ignorance, but this is itself a hasty and ignorant 
verdict. On the contrary, he was thoroughly familiar with 
the development of English thought, with its conse- 
quences in relation to the problem of knowledge, and with 
the encouragement it gave to an exclusive worldliness 
and to merely practical and historical studies. The better 
one knows him the more remarkable seems his prescience 
of the course of nineteenth-century thought, his appre- 
ciation of the added force which naturalistic views were 
presently to acquire through the progress of science, and 
his realization that religion was on the point of suffering 
at least a temporary banishment from educated minds. 
An illustration of this is his description of the agnostic 
man of science, written in the eighteen-fifties, before the 
term agnosticism had been invented: ‘‘He will begin, as 
many so far have done before him, by laying it down as 
if a position which approves itself to the reason, imme- 
diately that it is fairly examined—which is of so axio- 
matic a character as to have a claim to be treated as a 
first principle, and is firm and steady enough to bear a 
large superstructure upon it—that Religion is not the 
subject-matter of a science. ‘You may have opinions in 
religion, you may have theories, you may have argu- 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 73 


ments, you may have probabilities; you may have any- 
thing but demonstration, and therefore you cannot have 
science. In mechanics you advance from sure premises to 
sure conclusions; in optics you form your undeniable 
facts into system, arrive at general principles, and then 
again infallibly apply them: here you have Science. On 
the other hand, there is at present no real science of the 
weather, because you cannot get hold of facts and truths 
on which it depends; there is no science of the coming 
and going of epidemics; no science of the breaking out 
and the cessation of wars; no science of popular likings 
and dislikings, or of the fashions. It is not that these 
subject-matters are themselves incapable of science, but 
that, under existing circumstances, we are incapable of 
subjecting them to it. . . . And, as it would be absurd 
to dogmatize about the weather, and say that 1860 will 
be a wet season or a dry season, a time of peace or war, 
so it is absurd for men in our present state to teach any- 
thing positively about the next world, that there is a 
heaven, or a hell, or a last judgement, or that the soul is 
immortal, or that there is a God. . . . Well, then, if Reli- 
gion is just one of those subjects about which we can 
know nothing, what can be so absurd as to spend time 
upon it? what so absurd as to quarrel with others about 
it? Let us all keep to our own religious opinions respec- 
tively, and be content; but so far from it, upon no subject 
whatever has the intellect of man been fastened so in- 
tensely as upon Religion. And the misery 1s, that, if once 
we allow it to engage our attention, we are in a circle 
from which we never shall be able to extricate ourselves. 
Our mistake reproduces and corroborates itself. A small 
insect, a wasp or a fly, is unable to make his way through 
the pane of glass; and his very failure is the occasion of 
greater violence in his struggle than before. . . . Such 
is the state in which the world has lain ever since the 


< 


74 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


introduction of Christianity. Christianity has been the 
bane of true knowledge, for it has turned the intellect 
away from what it can know, and occupied it in what it 


cannot. . . . Truth has been sought in the wrong direc- 
tion, and the attainable has been put aside for the vision- 
ary.’ 993 


The truth is that Newman did clearly perceive and 
understand the forces which were opposed to religion in 
the nineteenth century, and that his career and his writ- 
ings, both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, can simply 
not be comprehended except in the light of this fact. To 
many, now as in the past, the fact is almost unbelievable, 
and for many it is far easier to deny it than to digest its 
consequences. It deeply bewildered Huxley, so far as he 
grasped it, and caused him to write to Knowles, the 
editor of the Nineteenth Century: ‘‘I have been reading 
some of his works lately, and I understand now why 
Kingsley accused him of growing dishonesty. After an 
hour or two of him I began to lose sight of the distinction 
between truth and falsehood.’’ This, I need hardly ob- 
serve, is a statement which may have a very different 
meaning from that which its writer intended. And to 
another correspondent Huxley wrote of Newman: ‘‘ That 
man is the slipperiest sophist I have ever met with. 
Kingsley was entirely right about him.’’* By universal 
consent since the publication of the Apologia Kingsley 
was not right about Newman, and Huxley’s words are a 
tacit confession that the latter more nearly met him on 
his own ground than any other Christian.writer he had 

8 Idea of a University, Pt. II, pp. 387-389. For a much earlier illustra- 
tion of Newman’s sense of impending danger to religion see his letter to 
his mother of 13 March, 1829, printed in Letters and Correspondence (edited 
by A. Mozley), I, 204. 

4 Life and Letters of T. H. Hualey, by Leonard Huxley, II, 239. In an 


article in the Nineteenth Century (June, 1889) Huxley stated that he could 
easily compile a primer of infidelity from Newman’s works. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 79 


encountered and, at least, gave him questions which he 
could not answer. 

Newman fully understood, then, all the difficulties of 
‘his faith, yet he never gave up his early conviction of a 

V world of immaterial reality in which we share and in 
which our earthly lives may be fulfilled. On the contrary, 
this conviction strengthened as he grew older, and it took 

/ on a definitely religious form when he was only in his 
sixteenth year. At that time he experienced what is 
known as ‘conversion,’ and from this event he dated his 
distinct religious convictions. The influences to which he 
was subjected were Calvinistic on the whole, and through 
them and through the reading of William Law’s Serious 
Call he was led to range himself, as a young man, with 
the Evangelical party of the Anglican Church. Distine- 
tively Calvinistic doctrines he held for no very long time, 
but he considered that his experiences and reading at 
fifteen and in several following years strengthened in 
him those childish imaginings already mentioned. They 
aided, he says, ‘‘in isolating me from the objects which 
surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the 
reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the 
thought of two and two only supreme and luminously 

_ self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.’’ 

J From this time Newman never wavered in his faith. 
The form of his belief and the manner of its expression— 
these were to change tremendously; but through all he 
held to his certainty of the spiritual nature and destiny 
of man, to his belief in a personal God, to his conviction 
that there had been a revelation committed to men and 
handed down from one generation to another. He wrote 
in a notebook in 1817: ‘‘The reality of conversion, as 
cutting at the root of doubt, providing a chain between 
God and the Soul, that is with every link complete ; I 


_— 


76 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


995 


know I am right. How do you know it? I know I know. 
In this he remained always unshaken. Was it to prejudge 
the whole matter? He was as anxious as any man to know 
the truth at any cost to himself, and we shall see that he 
was later much occupied with this question and did his 
best to answer it faithfully. 

/ The course of Newman’s development is to a peculiar 


/extent bound up with certain outward facts of his life 


which must now be briefly noticed. It is recorded that 
even until the moment of his son’s first journey to a uni- 
versity Newman’s father remained undecided between 
Oxford and Cambridge for the boy. The final decision, 
however, was for Oxford, and Newman was entered there 
in Trinity College. His career as an undergraduate was 
not without distinction, though marred at the end by a 
break-down which contributed to his failure in the 
schools, so that he came out with a Second Class instead 
of a First. Despite this handicap he was in 1822 elected 
a Fellow of Oriel College, which set him on his feet, open- 
ing up what he supposed would be a lifelong career at 
Oxford. In 1824 he took holy orders. In 1826 he became 
one of the tutors of his college, and was beginning to be 
known. About this time he also preached his first univer- 
sity sermon, and in 1827 he was one of the public exam- 
iners for the B.A. degree. In 1828 he became Vicar of 
St. Mary’s Church at Oxford. Fellow of Oriel College 
and Vicar of St. Mary’s—that remained Newman’s out- 
ward position for a number of years; until in fact the 
close of the Oxford Movement when, in 1843, he resigned 
St. Mary’s and in 1845 resigned his Oriel fellowship and 
entered the Roman Catholie Church. “ 

These, then, were the momentous “years of his life, the 
years of his change from the Evangelical to the Catholic 


5 Letters and Correspondence, I, 25. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 17 


point of view, the years of that great ecclesiastical cam- 
paign known as the Oxford or the Tractarian Movement, 
the years of that long struggle of the spirit which threw 
Newman finally into the arms of the Church of Rome. 
These were the years when Newman became a national 
figure whose every movement was anxiously watched by 
thousands, whose every word was subjected to the clos- 
est, and often the bitterest, criticism, and whose decisions 
were believed almost to mark the fate of the English 
Church. 
In order to understand these years it is necessary in 
the first place to realize that, though some aspects of 
vy Oxford life were godless enough in the early nineteenth 
century, still, Oxford was an active centre of Christian- 
/ ity. It was so to an extent not easy now to imagine. From 
immemorial days religion had been a part of the atmos- 
phere of the place, and one could scarcely breathe with- 
out taking it in. All members of the university were much 
and constantly concerned with the outward observances 
of religion; college dignitaries were almost universally 
clergymen; and religious discussion was everywhere. 
Much that passed for religion had little enough of reality 
in it, but nevertheless the shell, so to say, of a community 
formed in the interest of religion remained. For this is 
one fact which accounts for the apparently overwhelming 
hee of religion in the university. It occupied that place 
because of the inertia of human institutions. Oxford had 
been since the medieval age a vital part of the material 
establishment of the visible church in England; many of 
its colleges were in their origin, and in their still persist- 
ing rules, religious houses or memorials; they were the 
training schools of the higher clergy; religious profes- 
sions were necessary for entrance into them as well as 
for university degrees; religious instruction stood promi- 
nent in their courses of study; and religion was, as it 


78 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


were, the one common professional topic and concern of 
all college officers. 

Of course, since the Renaissance learning had been 
pursued less and less for the sake of religion, more and 
more for other ends if not for its own sake. But this 
change had not yet produced any corresponding altera- 
tion in the structure of the university or in its relation 
to the established church. Scholarship still had practi- 
cally no recognition in its own right. Intellectual excel- 
lence was one recognized claim, indeed, to preferment 
within the church, but, of course, within the church, so 
that in the England of the early nineteenth century the 
clerical was still the distinctively learned class, really 
much as it had been in the medieval age. Men who were 
in their primary interests logicians, metaphysicians, his- 
torians, classical or oriental scholars, men who in their 
primary interests were even mathematicians or scientists 
of one kind or another—all were gathered together under 
the shelter of the church. 

This, as things were, operated together with the ration- 
jalistic development of Protestantism in the eighteenth 
“century to make Christianity in the case of many indi- 
viduals more a matter of form than a living reality. But, 
on the other hand, the form remained, visibly and perva- 
“ sively present, for those who might at any time want to 
breathe fresh life into it. Moreover, the belief in a visible 
church, not as something added to religion nor as a mere 
means to its continuance, but as an integral part of reli- 
gion itself, had continued with many Anglicans ever since 
the separation from Rome in the sixteenth century. There 
it stood, the continuing divine society instituted by the 
Apostles of Christ, embodying in its churches, in its 
creeds, and in its liturgy a tradition extending far behind 
the Protestant Reformation and seeming to form a visi- 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 79 


ble connecting link between the believer of the present 
day and the miraculous revelation in the person of Jesus. 
And this was the atmosphere into which Newman was 
plunged when yet a mere youth, and in which he re- 
mained for many years, until he was past middle age. 
His Oriel fellowship, in addition, made him one of a 
group where religious interests and discussion were par- 
ticularly active, and it was at Oriel that he came into 
personal contact with most of those who were to be 
closely associated with him in the beginnings or the prog- 
ress of the Oxford Movement, especially with Richard 
Hurrell Froude, a brother of the historian James An- 
thony Froude, and with John Keble, the author of The 
Christian Year. Both of these were conservative by tem- 
perament. Perhaps one of Newman’s references to Keble 
may stand for the kind of influence which they exerted: 
‘‘Keble was a man who guided himself and formed his 
judgements, not by processes of reason, by inquiry or by 
argument, but, to use the word in a broad sense, by 
authority. Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an 
authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity; such 
are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; 
such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; 
such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; 
such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions. It 
seemed to me as if he ever felt happier, when he could 
speak or act under some such primary or external sanc- 
tion; and could use argument mainly as a means of rec- 
ommending or explaining what had claims on his recep- 
tion prior to proof. . . . What he hated instinctively was 
heresy, insubordination, resistance to things established, 
claims of independence, disloyalty, innovation, a critical, 
censorious spirit.’’ 
| Clearly the circumstances both of Newman’s youth 
and of his manhood made it inevitable that with him the 


80 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


conviction of man’s spiritual nature and destiny should 
‘take the form of whole-hearted adherence to Christianity. 
As has been seen, it did so before he went to Oxford, and 
/ through the remainder of his life Newman ‘knew that he 
‘knew’ the truth of Christianity, but all questions were 
not thereby disposed of once and for all. A new question, 
indeed, was immediately opened up—which of the exist- 
ing forms of Christianity was the true one? But beyond 
this question there was also another, and one more fun- 
damental. Newman laid claim to no miraculous inner 
light, to no occult power beyond the reach or the criticism 
of other human beings, and consequently he wished to 
give a rational account of the certitude he had reached, 
and he believed he could do so. His certitude did not 
render him insensible of the intellectual difficulties of 
Christian faith, nor did it close his mind to questions 
concerning historical evidence, and he honestly attacked 
both of these problems. 

As regards the former he says in the Apologia: ‘‘I am 
far of course from denying that every article of the 
Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by 
Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it 
is simple fact that, for myself, I cannot answer those 
difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the diffi- 
culties of religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; 
but I have never been able to see a connexion between 
apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and mul- 
tiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubt- 
ing the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thou- 
sand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand 
the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. 
There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I 
am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines them- 
selves, or to their compatibility with each other. A man 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 81 


may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical 
problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, 
without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a 
certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points 
of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, 
encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon 
our minds with most power.’’ 

He goes on to speak of what most would regard as a 
crucial instance: ‘‘ People say that the doctrine of Tran- 
substantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the 
doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believ- 
ing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman 
Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared 
this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is 
difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it 
difficult to believe? . . . For myself, I cannot indeed 
prove it, I cannot tell how it is; but I say, ‘Why should 
not it be? What’s to hinder it? What do I know of sub- 
stance or matter? Just as much as the greatest philoso- 
phers, and that is nothing at all’;—so much 1s this the 
ease, that there is a rising school of philosophy now, 
which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of 
our knowledge in physics. The Catholic doctrine leaves 
phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena 
go; on the contrary, it says that they remain: nor does it 
say that the same phenomena are in several places at 
once. It deals with what no one on earth knows anything 
about, the material substances themselves.’’ 

This, of course, is perfectly true, and it brings out the 
erux of the problem. Religion deals with matters beyond 
the range of verifiable experience, and so necessarily 

{makes pronouncements which are mysterious to the 
human intellect. What is to hinder belief, however, if 
one is satisfied that the doctrine promulgated, mysterious 


82 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


though it be, does have a divine origin? On the contrary, 
belief then becomes not only a possibility, but a funda- 
mental moral duty. 

Here is the real question—how is one to reach certainty 
of the being of a God? Newman did not endeavour to 
revive any of the so-called proofs of God’s existence 
which had been examined and discredited by Kant. On 
the contrary, he tacitly recognized that a formal demon- 
stration is impossible; yet he nevertheless considered 
that a valid certitude is attainable. It could be attained, 
he thought, on grounds of probability. He saw an accu- 
mulation of probabilities pointing towards the existence 
of God which so far outweighed the probabilities pointing 
in the opposite direction as to afford an adequate ground 
for the certitude which, as a matter of experience, some 
men actually feel. It was possible, he knew, for the doc- 
trine of probability to lead to the attitude embodied in 
the famous saying, ‘‘O God, if there be a God, save my 
soul, if I have a soul!’’ But the study of Bishop Butler’s 
Analogy and Sermons, which taught him the argument 
from probability, taught him also to base it primarily on 
the conscience. ‘‘If I am asked,’’ he said, ‘‘why I believe 
in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, 
for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence 
(and of that I am quite sure) without believing also in 
the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, 
All-judging Being in my conscience.’”* The conscience he 
regarded as the voice of God speaking to the individual 
as an ultimate authority which he will disobey at his 
peril, behind which he cannot go. This was his basic 
principle, and the only one he required for his purpose. 
The proposition he took to be self-evident to all those who 
actually listen to the voice of conscience and who, by 


6 For a fuller treatment see Grammar of Assent, especially pp. 101-121. 


Vv 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 83 


unquestioning obedience, make its commands living and 
central realities in their lives. ‘‘The religious mind,’’ he 


wrote to Wilfrid Ward, ‘‘sees much which is invisible to 
the irreligious mind. They have not the same evidence 


before them.’’ And to another correspondent he wrote 
of the Grammar of Assent: ‘‘My book is to show that 
a right moral state of mind germinates or even generates 
good intellectual principles.’’* 

The argument is from the data of experience, and New- 
man’s contention was that there is a sufficient empirical 
basis to justify our feeling the same certainty of God’s 
existence that we feel concerning the uniformity of na- 
ture. The data of conscience are given to us, arbitrarily 
if we like, but in exactly the same way as the data of the 
senses, and no more arbitrarily in the one case than in the 
other. There is even in both cases a dependence on the 
will for the reception of the data, though there is a differ- 
ence in degree. One may easily close one’s ears to the 
voice of conscience—not so easily to the roar of a tiger. 
And yet, as Newman truly says, ‘‘None are so deaf as 
those who won’t hear.’’> Moreover, in both cases the data 
given us fall short of logical demonstration—they sug- 
gest but do not formally prove the conclusions we draw. 
But the grounds of probability from which we draw our 
generalizations in the sphere of sensible phenomena are 
so strong that we should be fools to doubt those generali- 
zations, and in fact we do feel about them a certitude 
which is none the less genuine for the recognition that in 
some ways they must fall short of the reality they repre- 
sent. We realize that our experience is conditioned by 
our senses and limited in extent, and hence we say, ‘This 
or something like this is true,’ or we say, ‘This is the 

7 Life of Newman, by Wilfrid Ward, II, 247, 270. 


8 Letter to Henry Wilberforce, Ward’s Life of Newman, II, 249. The 
whole letter should be read. 


84 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


human expression of a reality which in its own nature 
or in an absolute sense we cannot know.’ But that a man 
should refuse to have faith in or believe in the uniform- 
ity of nature, and should refuse to act on it, we would 
regard as a wanton neglect of his duty to himself and to 
those dependent on him. Newman considered the case to 
be the same in the sphere of religion, with these differ- 
ences: that the commands of conscience are not forced 
on us as are sensible experiences, and that, since con- 
science speaks to us as one person to another, it is a 
wanton neglect of our duty to God as well as to ourselves 
to refuse to believe in the existence of Him who thus 
speaks. 

‘We need a Novum Organum in theology,’’ he wrote 
in one of his letters,? and it was to provide this or, at 
least, suggestions towards it that much of his work was 
done. About this initial question of God’s existence he 
so clearly summarized his position in another letter that 
parts of it must be quoted. He asked his correspondent 
‘‘whether our nature does not tell us that there is some- 
thing which has more intimate relations with the question 
of religion than intellectual exercises have’’—that is, the 
conscience. And he continued: ‘‘ We have the idea of duty 
—duty suggests something or some one to which it is to 
be referred, to which we are responsible. That something 
that has dues upon us is to us God. I will not assume it 
is a personal God, or that it is more than a law (though 
of course I hold that it is the Living Seeing God), but 
still the idea of duty, and the terrible anguish of con- 
science, and the irrepressible distress and confusion of 
face which the transgression of what we believe to be 
our duty, causes us, all this is an intimation, a clear 
evidence, that there is something nearer to religion than 


9 Ward’s Life, I, 436. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 85 


intellect; and that, if there is a way of finding religious 
truth, it lies, not in exercises of the intellect, but close 
on the side of duty, of conscience, in the observance of 
the moral law. . . . You must not suppose that I am 
denying the intellect its real place in the discovery of 
truth—but it must ever be borne in mind that its exercise 
mainly consists in reasoning—that is, in comparing 
things, classifying them, and inferring. It ever needs 
points to start from, first principles, and these it does 
not provide—but it can no more move one step without 
these starting points, than a stick, which supports a man, 
can move without the man’s action. In physical matters, 
it is the senses which give us the first start—and what 
the senses give is physical fact—and physical facts do 
not lie on the surface of things, but are gained with pains 
and by genius, through experiment. Thus Newton, or 
Davy, or Franklin ascertained those physical facts which 
have made their names famous. After these primary 
facts are gained, intellect can act; it acts too of course in 
gaining them; but they must be gained; it is the senses 
which enable the intellect to act, by giving it something 
to act upon. In like manner we have to ascertain the 
starting points for arriving at religious truth. The intel- 
lect will be useful in gaining them and after gaining 
them—but to attempt to see them by means of the intel- 
lect is like attempting by the intellect to see the physical 
facts which are the basis of physical exercises of the 
intellect, a method of proceeding which was the very 
mistake of the Aristotelians of the middle age, who, in- 
stead of what Bacon calls ‘interrogating nature’ for 
facts, reasoned out everything by syllogisms. To gain 
religious starting points, we must in a parallel way, in- 
terrogate our hearts, and (since it is a personal indi- 
vidual matter) our own hearts—interrogate our con- 


86 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


sciences, interrogate, I will say, the God who dwells 
there.’”*° 

In this way Newman reached certitude concerning the 
being of a God, but he had further to deal with the ques- 
“tion whether any doctrines promulgated in His name 
actually came from Him. ‘‘Starting then with the being 
of a God,’’ he wrote in the Apologia, ‘‘I look out of my- 
self into the world of men, and there I see a sight which 
fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems sim- 
ply to give the lie to that great truth, of which my whole 
being is so full; and the effect upon me is, in consequence, 
as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it denied that 
I am in existence myself. If I looked into a mirror, and 
did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling 
which actually comes upon me, when [I look into this liv- 
ing busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator. . . 
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its vari- 
ous history, the many races of man, their starts, their 
fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then 
their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their 
enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achieve- 
ments and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long- 
standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a 
superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn 
out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, 
as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, 
the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching 
aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futu- 
rity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the 
success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the preva- 
lence and intensity of sin, the prevailing idolatries, 
the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that con- 
dition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly de- 


10 Ward’s Life, II, 330-331, 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 87 


scribed in the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and with- 
out God in the world,’—all this is a vision to dizzy and 
appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound 
mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.’’ 

We can only say in the face of ‘‘this heart-piercing, 
reason-bewildering fact,’’ that either there is no God or 
we are at present cast off from Him. ‘‘/f there be a God, 
since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some 
terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the 
purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as 
the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is 
theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as 
certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of 
God. And now, supposing it were the blessed and loving 
will of the Creator to interfere in this anarchical condi- 
tion of things, what are we to suppose would be the 
methods which might be necessarily or naturally involved 
in His object of mercy? Since the world is in so abnormal 
a state, surely it would be no surprise to me, if the inter- 
position were of necessity equally extraordinary—or 
what is called miraculous.’’ 

He goes on to remind us that, not right reason, but 
reason as it acts ‘‘in fact and concretely in fallen man,’’ 
has ever had a tendency ‘‘towards a simple unbelief in 
matters of religion.’’ It was so in the ancient world, it 
is So in the modern world, and Protestantism has shown 
itself incapable of combating the tendency. Protestants 
had in the beginning been forced into rationalism against 
their will, because there is in fact no half-way house be- 
tween rationalism and the principle of authority. This, 
however, they did not realize, nor did they foresee the 
consequences of an untrammelled rationalism. Protestant 
doctrine was of necessity an assertion of private judge- 
ment, and this basis of individual self-reliance, though it 


88 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


could be obscured, could not be escaped. The doctrine of 
justification by faith made the religious starting-point 
subjective, and ‘‘in proportion as the Lutheran leaven 
spread, it became fashionable to say that Faith was, not 
an acceptance of revealed doctrine, not an act of the 
intellect, but a feeling, an emotion, an affection, an ap- 
petency; and, as this view of Faith obtained, so was the 
connexion of Faith with Truth and Knowledge more and 
more either forgotten or denied.’’ So-called spirituality 
of heart and the virtue of faith came to be regarded as 
identical, and religion was considered to be based, not 
on argument, but on taste and sentiment, and everything 
in doctrine was subjective. Men came to think ‘‘that Reli- 
gion, as such, consisted in something short of intellectual 
exercises, viz., in the affections, in the imagination, in 
inward persuasions and consolations, in pleasurable 
sensations, sudden changes, and sublime fancies. They 
learned to believe and to take it for granted, that Reli- 
gion was nothing beyond a supply of the wants of human 
nature, not an external fact and a work of God... . . 
Thus Religion was useful, venerable, beautiful, the sanc- 
tion of order, the stay of government, the curb of self- 
will and self-indulgence, which the laws cannot reach: 
but, after all, on what was it based? Why, that was a 
question delicate to ask, and imprudent to answer; but, 
if the truth must be spoken, however reluctantly, the 
long and the short of the matter was this, that Religion 
was based on custom, on prejudice, on law, on education, 
on habit, on loyalty, on feudalism, on enlightened expedi- 
ence, on many, many things, but not at all on reason; 
reason was neither its warrant, nor its instrument, and 
science had as little connexion with it as with the fashions 
of the season, or the state of the weather.’’* 


11 [dea of a Unwersity, pp. 28-29. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 89 


va Thus Protestantism degenerated into a subjective sen- 
timentalism, into a form of irrational self-indulgence; it 
could not properly claim an objective validity; it was 
kept in existence by the state and by considerations of 
social expediency, but it had no strength of its own and 
no inner principle of coherence. It could not restrain 
human nature or correct the free march of mind. Indeed, 
the principle of private judgement encouraged the free 
march of mind and, by a parallel development with sen- 
timental pietism, so encouraged what Newman called 
Liberalism or Latitudinarianism’ “By Liberalism,’’ he 
sald, ‘‘I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of 
thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of 
the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any suc- 
cessful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such 
matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of 
these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be 
reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the 
mistake of subjecting to human judgement those revealed 
doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independ- 
ent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic 
erounds the truth and value of propositions which rest 
for their reception simply on the external authority of 
the Divine Word.’’ 

So it was that Protestantism gave birth to develop- . 
ments which the earliest reformers would have been the 
first to denounce, and not only proved itself unable to 
make a stand against the ‘‘deep, plausible scepticism”’ 
of the natural man but actually encouraged it. And if 
experience has conclusively shown that Protestantism 
has been a pathway to atheism, it has also shown that the 
Bible taken by itself is not a sufficient ‘‘means of main- 
taining religious truth in this anarchical world.’’ Though 
the Bible be divine, its contents had in the first place to 


90 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


be determined by an authority outside of itself, by a 
council of the one Catholic Church. And, after it was thus 
constituted, it never answered a purpose for which it 
was never intended. ‘‘It may be accidentally the means 
of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, 
cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of 
man, and in this day it begins to testify, as regards its 
own structure and contents, to the power of that univer- 
sal solvent, which is so successfully acting upon religious 
establishments. ”’ 

What we need is a ‘‘concrete representative of things 
invisible’’ which has ‘‘the force and the toughness neces- 
sary to be a breakwater’’ against the ‘‘deep, plausible 
scepticism’’ of the natural man. Protestantism, natural 
religion, the Bible by itself—none of these, history itself 
conclusively shows, will suffice. ‘‘Supposing then,’’ New- 
man says, ‘‘it to be the will of the Creator to interfere 
in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in 
the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and distinct 
as to be proof against the energy of human scepticism, 
in such a case—I am far from saying that there was no 
other way—but there is nothing to surprise the mind, if 
He should think fit to introduce a power into the world, 
invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious 
matters. Such a provision would be a direct, immediate, 
active, and prompt means of withstanding the difficulty ; 
it would be an instrument suited to the need; and, when 
I find that this is the very claim of the Catholic Church, 
not only do I feel no difficulty in admitting the idea, but 
there is a fitness in it which recommends it to my mind.”’ 

The certainty of God’s existence, then, and the cer- 
tainty that for some reason the human race is cast off 
from His presence created in Newman’s mind a strong 
antecedent probability in favour of a miraculous revela- 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 91 


tion and of an infallible church placed in the world to 
guard through the generations the depositum fidei. He 
gave his unconditional assent to the Christian revelation 
because, some revelation being strongly probable, there 
were also other probabilities indicating that the Christian 
revelation alone, amongst many making the same claim, 
came from God. Christianity is the only one of the 
world’s religions which strikes the mind as the inevitable, 
perfect fulfilment of the anticipations raised by natural 
religion. Moreover, the history of the Hebrew nation and 
of the Mosaic religion present to us a foreshadowing of 
Christianity which so clearly shows the hand of divine 
providence as to constitute powerful evidence in favour 
of Christianity. And likewise the early history of the 
Christian religion exhibits features which are utterly 
inexplicable unless the religion did have in fact the divine 
origin which it claimed to have.” 

Similarly Newman concluded that the Roman Catholic 
Church rightly claimed to be the infallible guardian of 
the revealed word of God. There is an overwhelming 
probability that, since a revelation did take place, means 
were provided to maintain it perpetually in its purity. 
The one Catholic and Apostolic Church was, indeed, con- 
stituted to this end. Had it been broken into pieces with 
the passage of centuries, or, if it still existed, where was 
it to be found? The Anglican communion could claim 
Apostolic succession, but other notes of the true church 
it lacked. The Roman Church, however, had consistently 
and continuously asserted itself to be the one infallible 
custodian of the depositum fider. The foundation of that 

12 These grounds for the acceptance of the Christian revelation are 
treated at length in the Grammar of Assent, Chap. X, Pt. 2. In connexion 
with ihe last-mentioned, Newman examines Gibbon’s five causes for the 


early spread and success of Christianity (see above, p. 26 et seq.) and con- 
demns them as inadequate. 


92 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


claim was a revelation for which there was such evidence 
as to make it a duty to believe it ex aniumo;—was it not 
equally a duty to believe the Roman Church the one true 
Christian communion? Separation from Rome in the six- 
teenth century could be justified only on the ground that 
Rome had become so corrupt as to be the incarnation of 
Antichrist, and that those who separated composed the 
one Catholic and Apostolic Church restored to its ancient 
purity. But the Anglican communion was the only one 
which could take this ground, and it was local and na- 
tional; it could not claim catholicity. 

For some years Newman thought that the Anglican 
Church could successfully stand on the Apostolic succes- 
sion and on Roman corruption, but in the end the study 
of church history made him see that this position was 
untenable. The study of the Monophysite controversy in 
the fifth century brought before him a picture which un- 
mistakably reproduced the Anglican conflict with Rome 
in the sixteenth. But the Church had solemnly judged the 
Monophysites to be heretics and the judgement had been 
accepted as final and absolute, 7.e., as infallible. ‘‘It was 
difficult to make out how the Hutychians or Monophysites 
were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were 
heretics also; difficult to find arguments against the Tri- 
dentine Fathers, which did not tell against the Fathers 
of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the six- 
teenth century, without condemning the Popes of the 
fifth. The drama of religion, and the combat of truth and 
error, were ever one and the same. The principles and 
proceedings of the Church now, were those of the Church 
then; the principles and proceedings of heretics then, 
were those of Protestants now. I found it so—almost 
fearfully; there was an awful similitude, more awful, 
because so silent and unimpassioned, between the dead 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 93 


records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the 
present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the six- 
teenth. It was like a spirit rising from the troubled 
waters of the old world, with the shape and lineaments 
of the new. The Church then, as now, might be called 
peremptory and stern, resolute, overbearing, and relent- 
less; and heretics were shifting, changeable, reserved, 
and deceitful, ever courting civil power, and never agree- 
ing together, except by its aid; and the civil power was 
ever aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the invisi- 
ble out of view, and substituting expediency for faith.’’ 
It was shortly after he had made this discovery that a 
friend pointed out to him the words of St. Augustine 
written against the Donatists, Securus judicat orbis ter- 
rarum. The case of the Donatists was not parallel with 
that of the Anglicans but, nevertheless, Augustine’s 
words did apply as well to the Monophysites as to the 
Donatists, and did define the position the Church had 
taken equally against them, against the Arians, and 
against the Anglicans. The words rang in Newman’s 
ears. He had seen a ghost. ‘‘Who can account for the 
impressions which are made on him? For a mere sen- 
tence, the words of St. Augustine struck me with a power 
which I never had felt from any words before. . . . They 
were like the Tolle, lege—Tolle, lege, of the child, which 
converted St. Augustine himself.’’ The thought had dis- 
tinctly crossed his mind, ‘‘The Church of Rome will be 
found right after all.’’ Nor could he ever afterwards get 
away from that, though at times he thought he might 
and though he resolved to be guided, not by his imagina- 
tion, but by his reason and to do nothing hastily. 
Moreover, St. Augustine’s words did not change the 
fact, clear and unescapable, that the Roman Church of 
the sixteenth century and the nineteenth differed vastly 


94 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


from the Catholic Church of the first Christian centuries. 
What did the difference mean? Was it a proof of the cor- 
ruption and decay of the Roman communion, or was it, 
on the contrary, simply the measure of the necessary, 
logical development of the living Church, comparable 
to the development of a living organism? Newman set 
himself to study this question. He proceeded to dis- 
tinguish seven tests of legitimate development, or notes 
of the true Church, by the application of which he sought 
to determine the significance of the changes within the 
Roman Church brought about during the passage of the 
Christian centuries. First, a true development preserves, 
while a corruption destroys, the central idea or typical 
character of a religion. Second is the continuity of prin- 
ciples. Doctrines vary in appearance with the minds re- 
ceiving them, but in a genuine development one can 
always discern a continuity of principle underneath their 
different expressions and their successive expansions. 
Thirdly, life means growth, and so the power of assimila- 
tion, the power of a doctrine to gather up truth from the 
outer world and incorporate it within itself, is another 
test of a faithful development. Logical sequence is a 
fourth test. Ideas grow silently and spontaneously, with- 
out conscious system, but, when they form part of a true 
development, subsequent analysis shows them to have a 
logical character and connexion. Fifthly, in a real de- 
velopment one can discover in its earlier stages anticipa- 
tions of its future. Instances, though perhaps vague and 
isolated, of what is later to be elaborated, may occur 
from the first, while only after the passage of time are 
they brought to perfection. Sixthly, a true development 
is conservative of the course of earlier developments. It 
illustrates and corroborates, instead of obscuring and 
contradicting, the body of thought from which it pro- 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 95 


ceeds. And permanence, or chronic vigour, is a seventh 
test of a faithful development. Heresy is an unstable 
compound of truth and falsehood and consequently, being 
divided against itself, it soon dies or disappears, while 
doctrine having within it a genuine vitality lives on un- 
impaired. 

Newman applied these tests to the Roman Church in 
his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Life 
as we know it is a process of constant change. It is so 
with institutions as it is with organisms. Christianity he 
had come to see as an incarnation of the spiritual world 
accommodated to earthly conditions. Circumstances were 
always altering themselves, and with them the expression 
of doctrine. But in a living church, carrying through the 
generations a revelation made once and for all, succes- 
sive changes of circumstance would but give constantly 
fresh opportunities for the appearance of new aspects 
of the transcendent truth which is in its reality one and 
eternal. And a communion which attempted not to change 
at all, or which attempted chimerically, with antiquarian 
zeal, to return to Apostolic conditions, or which admitted 
development up to a certain period in history and then 
attempted arbitrarily to arrest it as did the Anglican— 
such communions had lost the principle of life. ‘‘In a 
higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to 
change and to be perfect is to have changed often.’’ The 
application of the seven tests to the Church of Rome 
showed, as far as they went, that through all changes 
Rome had maintained continuously her distinctive char- 
acter. With ‘‘gravity, distinctness, precision, and ma- 
jesty’’? she had advanced through the ages in a true 
development, so that she remained always the same in 
her still continuing growth towards the full and perfect 
expression of the Christian faith. 


96 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


So it was that he reached the end of his long pilgrim- 
age of the spirit in the full conviction that the Roman 
was the one infallible Church of God upon earth. Yet this 
conviction by itself would perhaps never have caused 
him to leave the Anglican for the Roman communion. 
He felt an indescribably deep love for Oxford and for 
the English Church. He had consecrated his life whole- 
heartedly to their service, nor was he one to forget his 
solemn responsibility as an Anglican priest. He was 
bound in his position, too, by personal ties whose sever- 
ance was a cruel pain. It is difficult to grasp, and impos- 
sible to relate, the anguish he certainly felt as he con- 
templated this final step. Moreover, the course of the 
Oxford Movement itself gave him a powerful reason for 
remaining an Anglican, though, on the other hand, it was 
also a development of the Oxford Movement which finally 
turned him out of the English Church and so brought 
him to consider it his duty to himself to go over to Rome. 

The story of the Oxford Movement has often been told, 
and I shall say of it only what is needful to explain New- 
man’s final conversion. I have already indicated the cir- 
cumstances, inner and outer, which made Newman as a 
young man a sincere, unconditional believer in dogmatic 
Christianity. And two men have been mentioned, Keble 
and Rk. H. Froude, who were largely instrumental in 
bringing Newman to the Catholic view of Christianity. 
It has been said, probably with much truth, that the pub- 
lication of Keble’s Christian Year was the real beginning 
of the Oxford Movement. In those poems Keble quietly 
and serenely assumed that the English Church was 
‘catholic and reformed.’ He was not polemical; but he 
presented Anglican doctrine as a consistent whole which 
had existed as such from the beginning of Christianity. 
Religion was to be accepted on authority; it had come 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 97 


down by Apostolic succession; the presence of our Lord 
was renewed in the sacraments; those in communion with 
Him composed one Holy Catholic Church ;—such propo- 
sitions as these Keble tacitly opposed to the Protestant 
and rationalistic doctrines then current, and he made 
them seem the natural or even inevitable counterparts 
of his own sincere piety and high otherworldliness. The 
effect of the book was deep and widespread, and showed 
that there was a large public ready for a strong re-asser- 
tion of ‘Catholic truth.’ 

It exhibits, moreover, in concrete form the kind of in- 
fluence which was exerted on Newman by several of his 
friends, and which he was ready to receive. By the late 
1820’s he saw Christianity in grave danger from forces 
which, so far as he understood them, he could neither 
approve nor respect. Private judgement and rationalism 
he estimated from their fruits—a suicidal anarchy in 
religion, in morals, and in social affairs. The horrors and 
excesses of the French Revolution were still too close to 
be forgotten—its spirit of hot-headed violence, its repu- 
diation of divine authority in the name of reason, which 
suddenly and fearfully released all that is malign in 
human nature and gave the lie to all plausible talk about 
man’s natural goodness. He saw, in short, only destruc- 
tion and the release of evil resulting from the use of 
reason as it acts ‘‘in fact and concretely in fallen man.’’ 
He saw some philosophers denying man’s power to know 
reality as it is in itself, and others straightway assuming 
that there is nothing to know save phenomenal appear- 
ances, and proceeding to erect a new philosophy, pur- 
porting to be based on the solid foundation of experience, 
in which human nature was submerged in mechanism and 
the senses. This was a denial of human nature as he knew 
it existing in himself, and he not unnaturally concluded 
that men were still pursuing, as of old, a vain wisdom 


98 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


and a false philosophy. Liberalism and rationalism were 
of the devil, whatever seemingly good things they offered 
to catch the unwary, and he would neither accept them 
nor compromise with them. The spirit of worldliness had 
always shown itself, under the mask of common sense, 
to be the spirit of madness and base folly. Given time, it 
would do so again; meanwhile, whatever came of it, he 
would not be taken in with the common.run of men. 

His resultant temper can be seen in a number of the 
poems which he composed for the Lyra Apostolica. Eing- 
land he called the ‘Tyre of the West’ and bade her shun 
the pride of earthly power— 


Dread thine own power! Since haughty Babel’s prime, 
High towers have been man’s crime. 

Since her hoar age, when the huge moat lay bare, 
Strongholds have been man’s snare. 


When he sought to utter the truth that burned within 
him, 


A hundred reasoners cried—‘‘ Hast thou to learn 
Those dreams are scattered now, those fires are spent?’’ .. . 
Perplexed, I hoped my heart was pure of guile, 
But judged me weak in wit, to disagree ; 
But now, I see that men are mad awhile, 
And joy the Age to come will think with me :— 
"Tis the old history—Truth without a home, 
Despised and slain, then rising from the tomb. 


To the rationalizers in religion he said: 


Ye cannot halve the Gospel of God’s grace; 
Men of presumptuous heart! I know you well. 
Ye are of those who plan that we should dwell, 
Each in his tranquil home and holy place; 
Seeing the Word refines all natures rude, 
And tames the stirrings of the multitude. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN a) 


And ye have caught some echoes of its lore, 
As heralded amid the joyous choirs ; 
_ Ye marked it spoke of peace, chastised desires, 
Good-will and merey—and ye heard no more; 
But, as for zeal and quick-eyed sanctity, 
And the dread depths of grace, ye passed them by. 


And so ye halve the Truth; for ye in heart, 

At best, are doubters whether it be true, 

The theme discarding, as unmeet for you, 
Statesmen or Sages. O new-encompassed art 
Of the ancient Foe !—but what, if it extends 
O’er our own camp, and rules amid our friends? 


When these lines were written he had taken his stand, 
and knew that he had a work to do. Already he was ask- 
ing himself about the possibility of re-uniting the Angli- 
can and Roman Churches, though he did not think it could 
be hoped for. ‘‘Oh that Rome were not Rome,’’ he wrote 
to his sister in 1833, ‘‘but I seem to see as clear as day 
that a union with her is impossible. She is the cruel 
Church asking of us impossibilities, excommunicating us 
for disobedience, and now watching and exulting over 
our approaching overthrow.’’* But, if Rome was cruel 
and corrupt, it followed that the Church of England was 
the one Catholic and Apostolic Church; and it was his 
duty to try to purge it of its taint of Protestantism and 
rationalism. He expected to be called a Papist when his 
aims became known, but he was confident of his rightness 
and did not fear opposition.** 

Hngland at this time was beginning to recover from 
the fright administered by the French Revolution and 
the Napoleonic wars, and the spirit of liberalism was be- 
ginning more or less cautiously to show itself in polities 


13 Letters and Correspondence, I, 385. 
14 [bid., I, 490. 


100 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


as well as in religion. Long-agitated demands for govern- 
mental reform at length forced the passage of the so- 
called Great Reform Bill in 1832. In the following year 
the forces of liberalism succeeded in abolishing certain 
bishopries of the Established Church in Ireland. Their 
abolition was really no more than a recognition of the 
fact that for the most part the Established Church in 
Ireland was only an empty shell. At the same time this 
step saved a considerable amount of money. It was, how- 
ever, opposed by the Church, and was finally passed 
against the suffrage of the bishops of England and Ire- 
land. Thus it became an overt assertion of that secular 
sovereignty which in theory the British government had 
been able to claim since the sixteenth century, but which 
in practice it had not frequently asserted. Churchmen 
who took the high ground of a divine authority vested in 
them through Apostolical succession directly by our Lord 
could scarcely stand quiet under so direct an affront. The 
sovernment’s action taken by itself might be unimpor- 
tant, but the principle it illustrated was fundamental, for 
it exhibited the English Church under the absolute con- 
trol of a political party which did not hesitate to ‘rob’ 
and affront the Church for its own ends. The act showed 
the liberalism of England to be one in spirit with the 
liberalism of the Continent, and opened it to the charge 
of being anti-clerical in its sympathies and intentions. 
From a small beginning to what lengths might it not go? 
The Irish bill probably aroused stronger feeling in Ox- 
ford than anywhere else, and on 14th July, 1833, Keble 
preached in St. Mary’s Church a sermon against it, in 
which he termed its passage an act of national apostasy. 

The political situation gave Newman and his friends 
a concrete, unmistakable case against liberalism. It gave 
Newman, young, comparatively unknown, and without 
influence though he was, a definite opportunity to under- 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 101 


take the large task which he had conceived to be his duty. 
He regarded Keble’s sermon as the actual beginning of a 
concerted movement towards the renewing and strength- 
ening of the Apostolic Church in England, and he imme- 
diately took steps to follow it up effectively. An informal 
organization was created, the publication of the Tracts 
for the Times was begun, and other measures were un- 
dertaken incident to a thorough campaign. Newman was 
the real centre and soul of the movement, though for a 
time one of his friends, E. B. Pusey, was popularly re- 
garded as its avowed leader. When Pusey joined the 
movement he at once gave it, Newman said, a position 
and a name;—‘‘he had a vast influence in consequence 
of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his 
charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and 
his easy relations with University authorities.’’ In addi- 
tion, Pusey was the only contributor to the Tracts who 
published his contributions over his own initials. Thus 
Puseyism came to be the colloquial term of the day for 
tractarian doctrine, while Archbishop Whately’s remark 
that a Newmania had appeared in Oxford, which showed 
a truer appreciation of the facts, never gained a wide 
currency. 

The tractarian position was that the English Church 
properly occupied, or should occupy, a middle ground 
between the two extremes of Popery and Protestantism 
—it was Catholic and Reformed. Great efforts were made 
to work out this position and to give it a solid foundation, 
for which recourse was had both to the early fathers of 
the Church and to many Anglican divines of the seven- 
teenth century. How Newman’s historical studies finally 
convinced him that this position was untenable and that 
the Anglican Church was in schism I have already told. 
But, as I have said, this crushing discovery did not at 
once carry him to Rome. For better or worse he was in 


102 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


the English Church and there his duty lay, to do what 
good he could. He continued to feel grave difficulties in 
some points of Roman doctrine and grave objections to 
certain devotional practices which, if they were not com- 
manded, were tolerated or even encouraged by the 
Roman Church. And he continued to feel that as long as 
the acceptance of ‘Catholic truth’ was not expressly con- 
demned by Anglican bishops he could not only remain 
safely within the English communion, but should do so in 
the hope of purging his own Church of its errors. He 
desired a reunion with Rome, but one to be effected under 
conditions, not by individuals, but by Church with 
Church. 

It is perhaps the very simplicity of his position which 
in his own day and since has caused it to be misunder- 
stood. He could not conceive that a sincere Christian 
would not whole-heartedly desire an united church. Re- 
union with Rome might be as vain a hope in 1841 as he 
had considered it in 1833, yet to hope for it and work for 
it was the one right thing he saw. It might not come in 
his day, yet come it could if ever Rome should give up 
its idolatry and England should give up its Protestant- 
ism. It was not his business to preach to Rome, nor to . 
conduct diplomatic negotiations looking towards any such 
hollow reunion as would alone be possible save on the 
basis of a general, sincere desire and conviction on both 
sides. Romanists must cleanse themselves of their idola- 
try if they were ever to be cleansed, and on the same prin- 
ciple his business was with his own Church. ‘‘Our busi- 
ness is with ourselves,’’ he wrote, ‘‘to make ourselves 
more holy, more self-denying, more primitive, more 
worthy of our high ecalling.’’? He aimed to continue, then, 
in his effort to purge England of its Protestantism, trust- 
ing that, however distant the end he desired, he was doing 
his clear duty in trying to bring it nearer. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 103 


Meanwhile, however, despite strong and unremitting 
opposition, the tractarian movement had flourished, and 
its very success was now a source of embarrassment to 
Newman. He had gained a large following by the advo- 
cacy of Catholic doctrine, accompanied by what R. H. 
Froude called dreadful cursing and swearing against 
Rome. He could no longer continue to curse and swear 
against Rome, and was not this tacitly to invite the con- 
clusion that if he were logical he would go over to that 
communion? He had long held, with Bishop Bull and 
other seventeenth-century divines, that nothing could 
justify the separation of the sixteenth century short of 
the contention that Rome was Antichrist, and that this 
was accordingly an essential article of Anglican theol- 
ogy.” Some of his followers began to be seriously uneasy, 
and they were, in addition, troubled about remaining 
longer in the Anglican communion when the Thirty-Nine 
Articles contained, in the opinion of many, a condemna- 
tion of Catholic doctrine. Newman held that the Articles 
could be so interpreted as to show that they condemned 
the abuse, but not the use, of the essential doctrines of the 
Apostolic Church. He now considered it a matter of life 
and death to bring this out explicitly, as a final measure 
towards holding his unruly followers within their own 
Church. To this end he wrote T'ract Ninety, the last of 
the Tracts for the Tumes. 

It has been said that he was not prepared for the out- 
break of hostile demonstrations and abuse called forth 
by the tract, though he afterwards wrote in the Apologia 
that he had recognized at the time that he was engaged in 
an experumentum crucis. ‘‘I have no doubt,’’ he says, 
‘‘that then I acknowledged to myself that it would be a 
trial of the Anglican Church which it had never under- | 


15 Coleridge had held the same opinion (On the Constitution of the 
Church and State, 1830, pp. 157-158). 


104 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


gone before—not that the Catholic sense of the Articles 
had not been held or at least suffered by their framers 
and promulgators, and was not implied in the teaching 
of Andrewes or Beveridge, but that it had never been 
publicly recognized, while the interpretation of the day 
was Protestant and exclusive.’’ Those who were respon- 
sible for the Protestant and exclusive interpretation of 
the day at once proceeded to condemn Newman’s tract, 
publicly, officially, and as thoroughly as they could. For 
some years they had been growing more and more 
alarmed at both the aims and the success of the trac- 
tarian leaders. They had cried out against the ‘Popery’ 
of the ‘Oxford malignants,’ as Thomas Arnold with 
Christian love and charity had dubbed them, but they 
had not seen their way to put the movement down. Now 
Newman himself had given them their chance, and they 
promptly attempted to make the most of it. 

It is generally agreed that Newman’s interpretation 
of the Articles was more adroit than just, that, in fact, 
he went against their obvious sense. But it is undeniable , 
that the Articles are intentionally ambiguous and, in 
addition, Newman’s real attitude and the difficulty he 
faced are not always remembered. He had concluded it 
to be his duty to remain in the English Church and to 
attempt to purge it of its taint of Protestantism; but, 
then, he was confronted with the danger that his aim 
would be discredited and defeated by individual seces-_ 
sions to Rome on the part of some of his followers, and 
he was forced to an open and premature test of Anglican 
toleration of Catholic doctrine in order to meet this 
danger. It might be—he himself admitted that it was— 
difficult to interpret the Articles as he attempted to inter- 
pret them; nevertheless the experiment had to be made 
whether or not the English Church was Catholic, for if it 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 105 


expressly denied his contention he could no longer in 
conscience remain within it or ask his followers so to do. 
_ The test was decisive, T'ract Ninety was unmistakably 
condemned, and the English Church deliberately resolved 
to continue in its traditional ambiguous position. In the 
spring of 1839 Newman had published an article in which 
he said that at any rate the tractarian agitation must 
have the good result of rousing men to think earnestly 
about their religion, so that, whether they came to true 
or false conclusions, at least the ideas of the coming age 
upon religion would be real, whereas ‘‘in the present day 
mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who ean set 
down half-a-dozen general propositions, which escape 
from destroying one another only by being diluted into 
truisms, who can hold the balance between opposites so 
skilfully as to do without fulerum or beam, who never 
enunciates a truth without guarding himself against 
being supposed to exclude the contradictory—who holds 
that Scripture is the only authority, yet that the Church 
is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it 
does not justify without works, that grace does not de- 
pend on the sacraments, yet is not given without them, 
that bishops are a divine ordinance, yet those who have 
them not are in the same religious condition as those who 
have—this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; 
this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, 
but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to 
guide it through the channel of no-meaning between the 
Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.’’ 

Without doubt the Oxford Movement had the effect 
Newman claimed for it upon hundreds, probably thou- 
sands, of individuals. Time also was to show that its 
effect upon the English Church was permanent and far- 
reaching, but for the moment the ‘safe’ men had a com- 
plete triumph, and the Church, in repudiating Newman, 


106 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


forced him into his final repudiation of Anglicanism. He 
was forced to see, as he says of Charles Reding in Loss 
and Gain, ‘‘that the profession of faith contained in the 
Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lu- 
theranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on 
no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there 
be such a thing as accident; that it had come down in the 
particular shape in which the English Church now re- 
ceives it, when it might have come down in any other 
shape; that it was but a toss-up that Anglicans at this 
day were not Calvinists, or Presbyterians, or Lutherans, 
equally well as Episcopalians. This historical fact did 
but clench the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of say- 
ing what the faith of the English Church was. On almost 
every point of dispute the authoritative standard of doc- 
trine was vague or inconsistent, and there was an impos- 
ing weight of external testimony in favour of opposite 
interpretations. ’’ 

This was what Anglicanism was, and Newman felt that 
churchmen were determined to keep it so because, as it 
stood, it was established and safe. It led to no unknown 
risks but, on the contrary, conduced to a mild and very 
pleasant worldliness. Reding says of Oxford in Loss and 
Gain, that ‘‘there is a worldly air about everything, as 
unlike as possible the spirit of the Gospel. I don’t impute 
to the dons ambition or avarice; but still, what Heads of 
houses, Fellows, and all of them evidently put before 
them as an end is, to enjoy the world in the first place, 
and to serve God in the second. Not that they don’t make 
it their final object to get to Heaven; but their immediate 
object is to be comfortable, to marry, to have a fair in- 
come, station, and respectability, a convenient house, a 
pleasant country, a sociable neighbourhood. . . . The 
notion of evangelical poverty, the danger of riches, the 
giving up all for Christ—all those ideas which are first 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 107 


principles in Scripture, as I read it, don’t seem to enter 
into their idea of religion.”’’ 

_ The same character is made to say elsewhere in the 
book that English churchmen commonly did not even exer- 
cise the ‘right and duty of private judgement.’ They ex- 
horted each other to seek the truth and bade each other to 
rely on private judgement, but all the while they pointed 
to a predetermined conclusion. They asserted that this 
had been ‘providentially’ reached, and so in effect sought 
to impose it by authority, though in words they dis- 
claimed any such intention. ‘‘Tell me,’’ Reding asks, 
‘supposing that we ought all to seek the truth, do you 
think that members of the English Church do seek it in 
that way which Scripture enjoins upon all seekers? Think 
how very seriously Scripture speaks of the arduousness 
of finding, the labour of seeking, the duty of thirsting 
after the truth. I don’t believe the bulk of the English 
clergy, the bulk of Oxford residents, Heads of houses, 
Fellows of Colleges (with all their good points, which I 
am not the man to deny), have ever sought the truth. 
They have taken what they found, and have used no pri- 
vate judgement at all. Or if they have judged, it has been 
in the vaguest, most cursory way possible; or they have 
looked into Scripture only to find proofs for what they 
were bound to subscribe, as undergraduates getting up 
the Articies. . . . No, they may talk of seeking the truth, 
of private judgement, as a duty, but they have never 
sought, they have never judged; they are where they are, 
not because it is true, but because they find themselves 
there, because it is their ‘providential position,’ and a 
pleasant one into the bargain.’’ 

Loss and Gam is a work of fiction, but the passages 
quoted obviously represent Newman’s opinion of the 
English Church at the time when he left it. And it is 
indeed difficult to see how any earnest and sincere Chris- 


108 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


tian, who put his religion before all else in life, and who 
took the one Catholic and Apostolic Church to be some- 
thing other than a mere empty form of words, could 
have come to any different conclusion. But there was 
another element of great weight which entered into the 
Anglican opposition to Newman, and which also entered 
at least to some extent into his final secession to Rome. 
R. H. Hutton, in commenting upon the pamphlet by 
Charles Kingsley which led Newman to write his Apolo- 
gia, said that Kingsley permitted himself a perfect 
licence of insinuation against Newman ‘so long as these 
insinuations were suggested by the vague sort of animal 
scent by which he chose to judge of other men’s drift and 
meaning.’”** The same gross instrument had long been 
used by Englishmen in the detection of Romanism and 
the same licence of insinuation in the denunciation of 
supposed signs of it. Despite his ‘cursing and swearing 
against Rome,’ Newman, from almost the beginning of 
the Oxford Movement, had been accused of Papistical 
tendencies. Later it was openly asserted that he was a 
secret emissary from the Pope, with a special licence to 
assume the disguise of an Anglican priest, with the object 
of making converts ‘from the inside.’ Such assertions 
were too wildly absurd to have any effect by themselves ; 
but close friends also misunderstood him and increas- 
ingly made him feel himself a stranger in their midst. In 
the course of time this told on him. He came to feel that 
not only was Tract Ninety formally condemned by the 
Church but he was personally repudiated by its members. 
In 1842 he wrote, concerning a young friend whom he 
was at the time holding back from conversion to Rome: 
‘‘Tf all the world agree in telling a man he has no busi- 
ness in our Church, he will at length begin to think he 


16 Quoted in Ward’s Life of Newman, II, 12. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 109 


has none. How easy it is to persuade a man of any thing, 
when numbers affirm it! so great is the force of imagina- 
tion. Did every one who met you in the streets look hard 
at you, you would think you were somehow in fault. I do 
not know any thing so irritating, so unsettling, especially 
in the case of young persons, as, when they are going on 
calmly and unconsciously, obeying their Church and fol- 
lowing its divines (I am speaking from facts), as sud- 
denly to their surprise to be conjured not to make a leap, 
of which they have not a dream and from which they are 
far removed.’’ A few months earlier he had written to 
R. W. Church, ‘‘I speak most sincerely when I say that 
there are things which I neither contemplate, nor wish 
to contemplate; but, when I am asked about them ten 
times, at length I begin to contemplate them.’’*” 

It was the English Church’s decisive repudiation of 
‘‘the ancient Catholic doctrine’’ which, Newman felt, 
forced him out of that communion and so absolved him 
from further public responsibilities. It was then, when 
he could act as a private individual, or rather, as he felt, 
he was forced so to act, that he could consider primarily 
his own soul’s safety; and it was then that he did begin 
to contemplate going over to Rome. Of course, with the 
conclusions he had already reached, to contemplate that 
step for himself was to make it in effect only a question 
of time when he would move. And so it proved. 


/ Many have wondered if Newman found at length in the 
/Roman Church the peace he had looked for. I can see no 
reason to doubt it. He had not been seeking rest or 
learned leisure, or stimulating or cultured companion- 
ship, or popular reputation or high public position; nor 
had he expected to find human nature miraculously dif- 


17 In this connexion the note on pp. 340-341 of Sermons Bearing on Sub- 
jects of the Day should be read. 


110 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ferent amongst Catholics from what it was amongst 
Protestants. Wilfrid Ward’s account of Newman’s life 
within the Roman Church is a book full of pathos. New- 
man was misunderstood, calumniated, conspired against 
by his co-religionists ; his ideas were met with opposition, 
his aims were frustrated, his pen all but silenced. 
Through many years he was so uniformly defeated that 
he almost concluded he had only to support a project in 
order to insure its failure. He could not remain blind to 
the fact that his enemies were often unscrupulous and 
did not hesitate to use underhand tactics against him, 
nor could he fail to see that he forfeited influential con- 
nexions by disdaining the arts of the flatterer and court- 
ier. He found other men ready and anxious to use him 
for their purposes, but cold, suspicious, or hostile when 
he did not prove a docile instrument or when he an- 
nounced purposes of his own. Yet, through all, one can 
detect no sign that Newman ever doubted the Roman 
Church to be the divine society invested with plenary 
authority in the days of the Apostles and infallibly pro- 
claiming through the generations the religion of Christ. 
It was from this belief that he became a Roman Catholic, 
and in this belief he remained steadfast until his death, 
and so retained through all his troubled years the peace 
he had sought. It has to be remembered, of course, that 
to Newman throughout his life the invisible kingdom, the 
spiritual world, was almost literally the one real world 
and the end of all his aspirations and endeavours, and 
that the peace he sought was the certainty that he was 
doing all that could lie with a human being to make the 
invisible kingdom eternally his own. And if it was, as it 
seems to me and as I have tried to show, inevitable that 
his eager and intense spirituality should have taken the 
mould of historic Christianity, I do not see how he could 
have done otherwise than seek the one Catholic Church. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 111 


Nor is it at all likely that such faith as his would have 
been undermined by the crosses and disappointments he 
had to bear during his life as a Roman Catholic, and in- 
deed he has himself sufficiently answered this question in 
certain passages of Loss and Gain, in his Apologia, and 
in a number of the letters printed by Wilfrid Ward. 
Whether or not he was in the right of it is a different 
question, but one to which there can be no simple answer. 
No more convincing testimony could be desired than that 
in Ward’s Life of Newman to show that the Roman 
Church is no divine, infallible authority, but a merely 
human institution. To most this is no longer an open 
question but, if it were, the testimony in this book should 
be conclusive. I need hardly draw out the notes of world- 
liness, of a low ethical level, of blindness to fact, of super- 
stition, of pride, and the like which are sounded in this 
unadorned and candid narrative of Newman’s years of 
conflict with Roman ecclesiasticism, because, as I say, 
to most the question is already a closed one. But, though 
closed, it is not disposed of. The Roman Church not only 
has shown, but continues to show, a stubborn vitality 
which cannot be cavalierly disregarded. Though not 
equally nor at all times, nevertheless on the whole it does 
have, besides those other and contradictory ones just 
mentioned, the notes of a living church which Newman 
distinguished. What can we make of this? It is prepos- 
terous simply to reiterate the shallow charge of eight- 
eenth-century rationalism that the Church subsists 
through chicanery and fraud. Chicanery and fraud are 
perennial, inside and outside of the Church, but these 
have not enabled that body to keep long a-dying through 
nineteen centuries and more while heresies and philoso- 
phies and sciences and Protestant innovations have had 
their little day and then have languished or perished. No, 
if we are candid and unbiassed we must concede that the 


112 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Roman Church stands for something which is valuable 
and true. It does so in a grossly imperfect way, yet less 
imperfectly, less doubtfully, than any other religious 
body claiming the same ultimate origin. It is impossible 
to deny that on the whole Protestantism has been anti- 
Christian in its development and influence, that on the 
whole it has been, as Newman said, a pathway to atheism. 
Here the voice of history is unambiguous, and its verdict 
is wholly on Newman’s side. If, then, there is truth in a 
spiritual interpretation of life, and if this truth makes 
a difference in men’s lives, it is something to have it 
enshrined in an abiding institution which through the 
generations presents it concretely and unswervingly re- 
gardless of all passing fashions in thought and conduct 
which men turn up from year to year in their restless 
hunger for novelty. And this the Roman Church has 
somehow done, despite great stupidities, monstrous cor- 
ruptions, and almost unnumbered superstitions. And it is 
the only institution the western world has known which 
has had, and has still, the strength and toughness to keep 
on doing this, permanently. It is easy to say that the work 
should have been done better, but the obvious fact is that 
it has been done just as well as we ourselves and our like 
have permitted. 

Kiven so, however, to deny the Roman Church’s infalli- 
bility is to deny that thus far Newman’s belief was well 
founded. And it is to question much more. Newman saw 
no stopping-point between atheism and Catholicism; and 
at any rate it is clear that, if the miraculous revelation 
of Christianity is not infallibly conveyed to us by the 
Church, we do not and cannot ever have complete evi- 
dence that it took place. Further, we do not and cannot 
ever have a perfect witness to the truth of the creeds or, 
in other words, of the body of Christian dogma. The ‘ten 
thousand difficulties which do not make a doubt’ if they 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 113 


are propped by adequate authority may run to something 
more than a doubt if they have to support themselves. 
Yet here again there is the same real or apparent con- 
tradiction in the evidence and the same impossibility of 
an absolute or unqualified decision. For Newman had a 
knowledge of human nature and of life, of its real prob- 
lems and issues, which for subtlety and depth few men in 
any age have rivalled. Where did he get it? From wide 
and varied experience of the world? No, he lived secluded 
from the world all his life, and many of his great sermons 
were written when he was young. He anticipated experi- 
ence, and from a full mind and heart he beautifully gave 
out sober:and wise counsel to the weary, the oppressed, 
the wayward, the worldly-wise, the forward-looking, the 
self-reliant, the ‘useful-knowledge’ people, the mean- 
spirited rich. He knew them all; he knew their discour- 
agements, their self-deceptions, their inordinate ‘desires, 
their feebleness and blindness and coarseness, their bub- 
ble-like theories and hopes, their hardness and empti- 
ness; he knew the thousand ills to which they were sub- 
ject and the inward workings and infinite abysses of the 
heart; he knew too the smothered good that lay within 
them and the calls to which it might respond. And all that 
he knew he learned from the Christian religion, and some 
of it from dogmas now most widely discredited even 
within Christian churches—original sin, eternal punish- 
ment, baptismal regeneration. Through his words men 
could see life itself, in all its variety and apparent inco- 
herence, scrutinized, criticized, sifted finely, until its 
essential character came out, intelligibly expressed. And 
this they could see because this was what had been done 
for Newman, and for them, by Christianity. 

In his hands, then, the Christian conception of the 
world proved itself true to the abiding facts of individual 
experience, and gave life an intelligible meaning and an 


114 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


intrinsic worth which men could learn for themselves by 
trial. It gave them a work to do, which was sufficiently its 
own reward, which tested all their powers, and which was 
the full expression of all that was distinctively human in 
their nature. And if despite this evidence we still can- 
not believe with Newman the traditional account of the 
origin of Christianity, nor accept fully its development 
in the Roman Church, we may at least be forced, so far 
as we are not blinded by sheer prejudice, to accord the 
life of Jesus and the essential Christian beliefs an unique 
symbolic value. But, then, it is the fact, surprising as it 
may be to many, that this is precisely the value which 
Newman accorded to them. 

He tells in the Apologia how as a young man he was 
carried away by a philosophy which he found expressed 
in the writings of Clement and Origen. ‘‘Some portions 
of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like 
music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas which, 
with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so 
long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental 
principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispen- 
sations of the Eternal. I understood them to mean that 
the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the 
manifestation to our senses of realities greater than 
itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: 
pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly 
understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The 
Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; 
for ‘thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards 
were given.’ There had been a directly divine dispensa- 
tion granted to the Jews; but there had been in some 
sense a dispensation carried on in favour of the Gentiles. 
He who had taken the seed of Jacob for His elect people 
had not therefore cast the rest of mankind out of His 
sight. In the fulness of time both Judaism and Paganism 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 115 


had come to nought; the outward framework, which con- 
cealed yet suggested the Living Truth, had never been 
intended to last, and it was dissolving under the beams 
of the Sun of Justice which shone behind it and through 
it. The process of change had been slow; it had been 
done not rashly, but by rule and measure, ‘at sundry 
times and in divers manners,’ first one disclosure and 
then another, till the whole evangelical doctrine was 
brought into full manifestation. And thus room was made 
for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures, of 
truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season 
to be revealed. The visible world still remains without 
its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments 
and her hierarchical appointments will remain, even to 
the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly 
facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the ex- 
pressions in human language of truths to which the 
human mind is unequal.’’ 

Hlsewhere Newman developed this conception more 
fully and explicitly, in his treatise on the Arians and in 
the last of his Oxford Uniwersity Sermons, and it is 
bound up indissolubly with his acceptance of Christian- 
ity. In the sermon just mentioned he says that strictly all 
that we know of the physical world ‘‘is the existence of 
the impressions our senses make on us.’’ We do not have, 
then, ‘‘any true idea of matter, but only an idea com- 
mensurate with sensible impressions.’’ We find that our 
generalizations from sense-data are trustworthy for 
practical purposes within certain limits. We take them 
for true, as far as they go, but we are not so foolish as to 
think them commensurate with reality, even with physi- 
cal reality alone, because the moment we attempt to do 
so we find ourselves landed amidst fundamental contra- 
dictions, intolerable absurdities—in short amidst what 
in religion are called mysteries. Our calculation ‘‘has run 


116 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


its length; and by its failure shows that all along it has 
been but an expedient for practical purposes, not a true 
analysis or adequate image of those recondite laws which 
are investigated by means of it. It has never fathomed 
their depth, because it now fails to measure their course. 
At the same time, no one, because it cannot do every 
thing, would refuse to use it within the range in which it 
will act; no one would say that it was a system of empty 
symbols, though it be but a shadow of the unseen. Though 
we use it with caution, still we use it, as being the nearest 
approximation to the truth which our condition admits.’’ 

In other words, our scientific generalizations are what 
in theological language are called economies or accom- 
modations—they are approximations, adapted to our 
human condition, of truths which transcend these for- 
mule. Such are fables or myths. ‘‘Mythical representa- 
tions, at least in their better form, may be considered 
facts or narratives, untrue, but like the truth, intended 
to bring out the action of some principle, point of charac- 
ter, and the like. For instance, the tradition that St. 
Tgnatius was the child whom our Lord took in His arms 
may be unfounded; but it realizes to us his special rela- 
tion to Christ and His Apostles with a keenness peculiar 
to itself.’’ The myth brings home to us concretely the 
human meaning of our generalizations in the sphere of 
moral experience and generally in the realm of spiritual 
values. And so, Newman ends, ‘‘not even the Catholic 
reasonings and conclusions, as contained in Confessions, 
and most thoroughly received by us, are worthy of the 
Divine Verities which they represent, but are the truth 
only in as full a measure as our minds can admit it; the 
truth as far as they go, and under the conditions of 
thought which human feebleness imposes.’’ They ‘‘are, 
after all, but symbols of a Divine fact, which, far from 
being compassed by those very propositions, would not 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 117 


be exhausted, nor fathomed, by a thousand.’’ And it fol- 
lows, he points out, that the business of the reason is 
but to act as an instrument or servant, drawing out as 
best it may into intelligible form the transcendent truths 
which are told us, as he believed, by direct Divine revela- 
tion, or are suggested to us by our experience. 

Like Coleridge, Newman considered that a symbol 
must partake of the reality which it represents, though, 
unlike him, he did not attempt to fortify in this way the 
evidence for the historic basis of Christianity. He merely 
contended that religious truth is and must be imperfectly 
symbolized when reduced to human terms, but he did, as 
far as they go, accept in the orthodox or literal sense, 
simply on the authority of the Church, the supernatural 
character and mission of Jesus and the body of dogma 
developed therefrom. Yet there remains this significant 
consequence of his view: that, since Christian dogma 
and its systematic exposition in a theology are but ap- 
proximations to the truth, adaptations conforming it to 
those who receive it, as age succeeds age not only changes 
in expression, but developments, are to be looked for. 
‘*Here below to live is to change and to be perfect is to 
have changed often.’’ As a Roman Catholic Newman con- 
stantly lamented the centralization within the Church 
which had followed upon the Reformation, and the de- 
cline or disappearance of the great theological schools. 
In them in earlier days theology had developed by free 
debate and controversy into a form suitable to the age 
and the condition of knowledge. But in his day he found 
nothing like the same opportunity for further develop- 
ment which was equally necessary. It was one of his vain 
efforts to found an institution of this kind in Dublin. 
There, had he had his way, men in all departments of 
learning and science would have had complete freedom 


118 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


to develop their own work on its own lines. This may 
sound like a dream, and, as things were, a dream it 
proved. But it was actually Newman’s aim for the Catho- 
lic University of Dublin, and he was completely confident 
of the result. 

Truth issues, slowly and by degrees, but still does 
issue, he thought, from many minds working freely 
together. In the midst of the great modern age of dis- 
covery he remained sceptical of much that passes 
amongst us for ‘science’ because he saw it constantly 
changing and saw men nevertheless hastily and madly 
building vast and solemn philosophies on these shifting 
foundations. He preferred to build more surely if more 
slowly, and he distrusted daily proclamations of revolu- 
tionary change which had to be modified or withdrawn in 
the light of the next day’s news. In the university he 
planned he considered that theologians and scientists 
working together would hold each other in check, and 
that knowledge would come slowly out of their joint en- 
deavours. Scientific hypothesis and theology would be 
subjected to mutual criticism, objection, argument, and a 
gradual sifting. And of no truth which came in such an 
orderly, responsible fashion would he have been afraid. 
‘‘How dreadful it is to have to act on great matters so 
much in the dark,’’ he wrote to a friend in 1845. He was 
ready to welcome new light, so it was light, not with fear 
and misgiving but with profound gratitude. 

I say this with confidence, despite the popular impres- 
sion as to what it must mean to be a Roman Catholic. 
And I do so because I think it clear that Newman’s fun- 
damental concern was with certain factors of individual 
experience which no changes in our knowledge of the 
physical world and no changes in our conclusions from 
human history can in any wise alter. Howsoever it might 


CARDINAL NEWMAN 119 


be that conscious life depends for its manifestation on a 
physical organism, that it is temporary, the sport of 
chance, and the victim of sin, still, he knew that he was 
essentially, centrally, a spiritual being. He knew by direct 
experience that there is an invisible, timeless world which 
is the fulfilment of life, that even ‘here below’ he could 
maintain a precarious connexion with this world which 
was strengthened by the very ills he had to endure, and 
that he was led in so doing by a light which came not 
from himself and which was beyond his deserts. This 
ultimately was what he knew that he knew, and he sought 
its meaning. He was certain that this search, and un- 
swerving faithfulness to the best answer he could get, 
were necessary steps towards the fulfilment of his life, 
but he was certain also that new knowledge, if it was 
knowledge, could give him one thing only—a still better 
answer, which he knew was possible, and which he knew 
he needed, if it could be had. 

He may have gone wrong, with such light as was vouch- 
safed him. Nevertheless with single-hearted and life-long 
devotion he bore witness, in a way whose significance 
may not even yet be fully apparent, to what is central and 
abiding in human nature. It may or may not be right or 
possible to follow the whole way in the path which he 
took, but this cannot impair, and should not obscure, the 
importance and significance of his life and work. We at 
least cannot disregard the fact that a brilliantly-gifted 
and keen-minded man of the nineteenth century, a man 
whose character was at once saintly and manly in the full 
sense of both words, did utterly revolt from the mate- 
rialism of his day and stand uncompromisingly for the 
reality and primacy of man’s spiritual nature and des- 
tiny. His words and acts may tell his real story brokenly 
and faultily, as human words and acts do, yet they tell 
the story of one who lived, not amongst shadows and 


120 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


dreams, but in the real world of moral experience and 
spiritual values, and who did what he could to fathom 
the meaning of that experience and so to live a con- 
sciously and distinctively human life. 


LV. 
HUXLEY 


Marx Partison has told in his Memoirs how the exact 
sciences entered Oxford with amazing rapidity and began 
to exercise a momentous influence as soon as the ‘night- 
mare’ of Newman’s ascendancy was ended by his con- 
version to Rome. But, indeed, the current of naturalistic 
thought in England had not been interrupted in the 
eighteenth century by the rise of Methodism and Evan- 
gelicalism, and it was scarcely disturbed in the first half 
of the nineteenth century by the Romantic Movement in 
literature or the Oxford Movement in religion. The scien- 
tific activities which it fostered were kept out of Oxford 
or discouraged there longer than they would otherwise 
have been; but elsewhere Utilitarianism flourished, de- 
spite the efforts of Keble and Newman, the protests of 
Coleridge, and the heated outeries of Carlyle and others. 
Applied science steadily went on achieving its triumphs 
and working its vast changes in the constitution and out- 
look of society. And scientific investigations were being 
carried on fruitfully by an increasing number of men, 
one notable result being the publication of Lyell’s Prin- 
cuples of Geology in 1830. As the century advanced, fresh 
discoveries combined with their striking industrial appli- 
cation to give, year by year, firmer ground for the inde- 
pendence of science and for its authority. The industrial 
revolution had given science a firm hold on the daily lives 
of men; the steam railroad, the electric telegraph, and the 
like developments soon began to exercise a similar sway 
over their imaginations. And in 1859 the climax of the 


122 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


rise of science came with the publication of Darwin’s 
Origin of Species. 

Evolution, or development, of course, was not an en- 
tirely new concept. Though modern and recent, it had 
been in the air for half a century or longer and had begun 
perceptibly to influence thought. It is fair, however, to 
say that before Darwin it had been only a more or less 
interesting speculation, whereas, rightly or wrongly, it 
became invested very quickly after 1859 with all the 
authority of actual fact, which only the ignorant man or 
the fool would attempt to deny. As a fact, its crucial 
importance was unescapable. It gave to the sciences of 
organic life the centre of the intellectual stage, while to 
science as a whole it gave an unifying concept of appar- 
ently unlimited application. Evolution became a magic 
word, a talisman which was to explain everything in 
terms of a common process, from the tailless condition 
of guinea-pigs and men to the configuration of the starry 
firmament above us. This crowning achievement of the 
secular development of modern thought was, in fact, 
exactly what was needed in order to convince men that a 
new dispensation was at hand. Naturalistic thinkers were 
now prepared to step forth as the accredited interpreters 
of life, bringers of a new gospel which was to displace 
the outworn creeds and accumulated superstitions of the 
past, giving us instead the truth itself.* 

In endeavouring to learn the new truth we may begin 


1 Professor A. K. Rogers, in his English and American Philosophy Since 
1800 (p. 129), quotes a passage from Robert Owen which illustrates the 
assured temper already present in naturalistic thinkers in the first half of 
the century and widespread after 1859. Owen, after referring to the ‘‘vari- 
ous phases of insanity called religion,’’ says: ‘‘ Rejoice, all ye who have 
so long desired to see the period arrive when all the human race shall be- 
come wise and good in habits: for this weapon of mighty power has been 
discovered! Its name is TRUTH. Its sharpness and brilliancy, now that it 
is, for the first time, unsheathed to open view, no mortal can withstand.’’ 


HUXLEY 123 


with Huxley, the devoted friend and champion of Darwin 
and, as Leslie Stephen has called him, ‘‘the best wrestler 
in the intellectual ring.’? Thomas Henry Huxley was 
born in 1825. His father, a man of indifferent abilities, 
was at this time senior assistant-master of the semi- 
public school at Ealing, the school at which Newman 
studied until he went to Oxford. Huxley’s early training 
was of a haphazard character, and it was apparently as 
much from accident as from inclination that he was 
thrown into the study of natural science and medicine. 
As it turned out, fortune was kind, for nothing could 
easily have been happier for him. He obtained his medi- 
cal degree from the University of London in 1845. The 
next year he entered the naval medical service and was 
appointed assistant-surgeon of the surveying-ship Rat- 
tlesnake, which was on the point of going to sea. The 
ship’s major business was to chart a passage through 
reefs off the coast of Australia, but the admiralty recog- 
nized the opportunities to natural science offered by its 
voyage, and not only did the ship carry an official natu- 
ralist, but Huxley’s own appointment was the result of his 
known scientific interests. He was on the Rattlesnake for 
approximately four years, and during that time wrote 
several papers and accumulated material for others 
which laid the foundation of his career as a man of 
science. 

The year after Huxley’s return to England he was 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in acknowledgement 
of his work, and in 1852 he received the Society’s Gold 
Medal. This was satisfactory. His work was being pub- 
lished; despite the active jealousy of fellow-scientists he 
was gaining the recognition at which he aimed, and he 
was thinking of science as a vocation. He was thinking 
of it, he wrote to a friend, because it was clear to him 
that he could not get through life contentedly without full 


124 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


scope for the development of his faculties, and science 
alone offered this possibility. Other callings—law, divin- 
ity, medicine, politics—were ‘‘in a state of chaotic vibra- 
tion between utter humbug and utter scepticism.’’ Even 
so, however, for a time he hesitated, because, as he wrote 
to his future wife, to whom he had become engaged in 
Australia, ‘‘To attempt to live by any scientific pursuit 
is a farce. Nothing but what is absolutely practical will 
evo down in England. A man of science may earn great 
distinction, but not bread. He will get invitations to all 
sorts of dinners and conversaziones, but not enough in- 
come to pay his cab fare.’ Nevertheless he had fully 
determined that he was to make a name for himself,’ and 
so science, bread or no bread, won the day. 

His discouragement, moreover, soon faded in the light 
of better prospects. In 1854 he was appointed Professor 
of Natural History and Paleontology in the Royal School 
of Mines and Curator of Fossils in the Museum of Prac- 
tical Geology. Three years later he was appointed Exam- 
iner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in the 
University of London and in the same year was also ap- 
pointed Fullerian Professor of Comparative Anatomy 
at the Royal Institution. This may suffice to show that 
he was, on the whole very rapidly, achieving substantial 
recognition of his ability and his scientific accomplish- 
ments; and so true is this that when Darwin published 
the Origin of Species he named Huxley as one of two or 
three men who in his opinion composed his critical audi- 


2 Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, by Leonard Huxley, I, 101, 72. 

3 He had written to his sister in the fall of 1850: ‘‘I don’t know and 
I don’t care whether I shall ever be what is called a great man. I will leave 
my mark somewhere, and it shall be clear and distinct [ 1. H.H.. his mark | 
and free from the abominable blur of cant, humbug, and self-seeking which 
surrounds everything in this present world—that is to say, supposing that 
I am not already unconsciously tainted myself, a result of which I have a 
morbid dread.’’ (Life, I, 69.) 


HUXLEY 125 


ence. If these accepted his theory, he intimated, he would 
rest satisfied with his work and would feel assured that 
it must attain general acceptance in the course of time. 
The above list of posts held by Huxley may also indicate 
that he was entering upon an extremely busy life. He was. 
One is tempted to say that he could always see good 
reason why his aid was essential in any scientific or edu- 
cational enterprise, but it is also the fact that his remark- 
able abilities caused unusual and pressing demands to 
be made upon him and that many of them he welcomed 
because, through the greater part of his life, he continued 
to be badly in need of money for the support of his large 
family. Thus, until his health finally broke under the 
burden, he continued to do a certain amount of strictly 
scientific work and a large amount of academic lecturing, 
he sat on ten royal commissions, he held various other 
government posts, and he administered the affairs of 
several scientific societies. And, in addition to all this, 
Huxley found another kind of work to do, arising in the 
first instance out of the fact that in 1859 he did accept 
evolution as practically proved by the Origin of Species. 
He was led into active championship of the theory by the 
controversies which it immediately aroused, and from 
this time on, through popular lectures and essays, he 
increasingly took the role of chief propagandist for the 
cause of evolution and, also, for the cause of science in 
general. 

For this he was admirably fitted, and indeed it is be- 
cause of this activity that Huxley is still remembered 
outside of the laboratory or the museum. He was a clear 
and vigorous writer, an accomplished master of contro- 
versial attack and defence, and he was emphatically a 
party-man. It was with very good reason that at one time 
he was urged to enter English political life. All of this 
is so well illustrated by his rejoinder to Bishop Wilber- 


126 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


force at Oxford in 1860 that it must be quoted here, 
though it has become famous and has been many times 
repeated. The British Association for the Advancement 
of Science met in Oxford in 1860, and the theory of evolu- 
tion had already raised that inevitable clerical storm 
which it still raises wherever people are at once suffi- 
ciently ignorant and sufficiently religious. The Bishop of 
Oxford accordingly took the opportunity to deliver an 
address in which he assured his audience that evolution 
was an empty as well as an impious conjecture. In its 
course he turned to Huxley, who was sitting near him on 
the stage, and inquired ‘‘was it through his grandfather 
or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a 
monkey?’’ Perhaps the Bishop’s question was not quite 
so directly insulting, as later accounts of his words 
vary, but there is agreement that Huxley exclaimed to 
Sir Benjamin Brodie, who sat next to him, ‘‘The Lord 
hath delivered him into mine hands.’’ And when the 
Bishop had finished Huxley arose, ‘‘a slight tall figure, 
stern and pale, very quiet and very grave,’’ and ‘‘spoke 
those tremendous words’’: ‘‘I asserted—and I repeat— 
that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape 
for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I 
should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man, 
a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content 
with success* in his own sphere of activity, plunges into 
scientific questions with which he has no real acquaint- 
ance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and 
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point 
at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to 
religious prejudice. ”’ 

Those are memorable words. They are almost irresist- 

4I have omitted the word ‘equivocal,’ which precedes ‘success’ in the 


account written by J. R. Green, in obedience to Huxley’s statement that 
he was sure he had not used it. 


HUXLEY 127 


ible. They have a simplicity and downright force which 
only the fewest men attain. I do not say they are the 
words of a seeker after truth, I do not inquire about the 
legitimacy of the claim that religion and science occupy 
distinct and separate spheres, I do not ask if this is 
really a rhetorical appeal to scientific prejudice, nor do I 
ask if there was actually more than one point at issue. It 
is enough to say that Huxley was conscious of an imme- 
diate, practical need of the moment. The cause he repre- 
sented was being opposed by a powerful guild, and it 
would be a shrewd blow to discredit one of its foremost 
members in the very centre and home of ‘religious preju- 
dice.’ He was delighted at the gift of so excellent an 
opportunity, and he rose to make the best of it in a man- 
ner which required, and showed, full conviction, unusual 
courage, and the height of controversial skill. We should 
hardly need contemporary testimony, were it lacking, to 
prove that he succeeded in his object; but, on the other 
hand, we do not need to ponder his words long in order 
to the discovery that he considered only the immediate 
need before his eyes. 

This famous episode marks the beginning of a conflict 
with the representatives of religion in which Huxley was 
engaged through the remainder of his life. He says in the 
Preface to Science and Hebrew Tradition that for over a 
thousand years the greater number of the most highly 
civilized and instructed nations of the world ‘‘have con- 
fidently believed and passionately maintained that cer- 
tain writings, which they entitle sacred, occupy an unique 
position in literature, in that they possess an authority, 
different in kind and immeasurably superior in weight, 
to that of all other books.’’ Throughout this period they 
have held it to be indisputable that, ‘‘whoever may be the 
ostensible writers of the Jewish, Christian, and Mahome- 
tan seriptures, God himself is their real author; and, 


128 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


since their conception of the attributes of the Deity ex- 
cludes the possibility of error and—at least in relation 
to this particular matter—of wilful deception, they have 
drawn the logical conclusion that the denier of the accu- 
racy of any statement, the questioner of the binding force 
of any command, to be found in these documents is not 
merely a fool, but a blasphemer. From the point of view 
of mere reason he grossly blunders; from that of religion 
he grievously sins.’’? But fidelity to their discoveries 
forced Huxley and his fellow-scientists to commit this 
erievous sin of blasphemy, and so forced them to ques- 
tion the authority of the Bible. 

The quarrel between Christianity and the ‘carnal rea- 
son’ of man is, of course, as old as Christianity itself, but 
it has taken different forms in different ages. It is one 
thing to point out intellectual difficulties in a doctrine; 
it is a different thing to prove that it rests on or embodies 
mistakes in matters of fact. The Christian position was 
successfully maintained so long as it was merely a ques- 
tion of human opinion or human argument pitted against 
supposedly divine authority. But with the Renaissance 
the quarrel assumed a new aspect. The Copernican hy- 
pothesis, confirmed by the observations of Galileo, was 
the first great modern instance of natural knowledge in 
open conflict with the plain statements or implications of 
the Bible. This was not a matter for argument; it was a 
verifiable fact which demonstrated that the astronomy 
hitherto received as in accordance with the Bible was 
simply wrong. Strictly, it need scarcely be said, a single 
important instance of this kind should be sufficient to 
upset the whole doctrine of the plenary inspiration or 
infallibility of the Bible, but practically it was not so. 
It would seem that the dawn of modern astronomy had 
more effect in finally killing the pseudo-science of astrol- 
ogy than in unsettling religion. In various ways this con- 


HUXLEY 129 


tradiction between knowledge and the infallible Book 
was glossed over, so that the belief in the plenary inspira- 
tion of the Bible was still in Huxley’s younger days 
widely prevalent; and indeed as late as 1893 he thought 
that ‘‘many persons of unimpeachable piety, a few of 
learning, and even some of intelligence’’ yet continued 
to share it. 

But the theory of evolution was not only palpably in 
contradiction with the Bible, but in contradiction with it 
at a point which brought the full force of the difficulty 
home to men and made inevitable a renewal of active, 
probably bitter conflict between science and religion. If 
evolution was a fact, verifiable by any one who chose to 
study the available data, no one could longer pretend that 
the Biblical version of the creation was anything other 
than a mistaken guess such as was possible to men like 
ourselves at a time when nothing was really known about 
the origin of the earth and of life. But to admit this was 
not only to abandon the claim that the Bible was itself 
the inspired Word of God—or at least that certain por- 
tions of it were—but also to abandon, or at least radically 
to change the character of, certain developments of 
Christian theology. And this men were not prepared to 
do in 1859. On the contrary, they were roused to attack 
the evolutionists and to hinder their work. Huxley was 
undoubtedly right in insisting that his controversial bat- 
tles were forced on him, though it is also evident that he 
welcomed with enthusiasm the necessity of bearding the 
lions. 

He tells of the situation as he saw it in Science and 
Christian Tradition. ‘‘T had set out,’’ he says, ‘‘on a 
journey, with no other purpose than that of exploring 
a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no 
hair’s breadth from the course which it was my right and 
my duty to pursue; and yet I found that, whatever route 


130 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


I took, before long I came to a tall and formidable-look- 
ing fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an 
ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood 
the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board— 
‘No thoroughfare. By order. Moses.’ There seemed no 
way over; nor did the prospect of creeping round, as I 
saw some do, attract me. True there was no longer any 
cause to fear the spring guns and man-traps set by 
former lords of the manor; but one is apt to get very 
dirty going on all-fours. The only alternatives were 
either to give up my journey—which I was not minded 
to do—or to break the fence down and go through it.’’ 

As Huxley implies, this was not a real alternative to 
him, and without hesitation he resolutely set about break- 
ing down the fence. He used for his purpose both the 
instruments furnished by natural science and those which 
were being fashioned, then chiefly in Germany and 
France, by the application of the principles of historical 
criticism to the Bible. And he did his work with such 
thoroughness and zest that one wonders now how the 
result could ever have seemed doubtful. 

Moreover, he did not—as one might suppose both from 
his own words which I have quoted and from the fact 
that the conflict was begun because of the theory of evo- 
lution—confine his attack on the Bible to Genesis and its 
stories of the creation, temptation, and flood. Taking 
Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor as a text, he showed 
that the religious conceptions of Saul and his contem- 
poraries were strictly comparable with those of other 
peoples of the same level of civilization, and that there 
could be no better reason for giving credence to them 
than to the notions concerning the supernatural of other 
half-barbarous races. Likewise he extended his criticism 
to the New Testament, seizing on the story of the Gada- 
rene swine as an illustration not only of grave injustice 


HUXLEY 131 


done to the innocent owners of the swine, which Chris- 
tians cannot square with even elementary ethical princi- 
ples, but also of heathen demonology, to a belief in which 
Christians are, if they are logical, committed. 

Briefly, Huxley undertook to show that the application 
of the principles of historical criticism to the Biblical 
documents tended strikingly to weaken the value of many 
of them as first-hand evidence for the truth of their 
contents, and that, besides, the definitely ascertained 
facts or the overwhelming probabilities established by 
the modern increase of natural knowledge plainly con- 
tradicted much that the Bible contains. The general re- 
sult was to deprive the Bible of all unique or peculiar 
authority, and so to place it on a level with other merely 
human documents which have come to us out of the past. 
In other words, so far as the Bible contained verifiable 
truth it was to be accepted, not because it was in the Bible 
but because it was verifiable. Extraordinary stories were 
to be believed no more because they are in the Bible than 
similar stories are to be believed because they are found 
in, for example, the Iliad, or Beowulf. This was quite to 
cut away Christianity’s basis in authority. And it was 
more, it was also to see the Gospels as legendary narra- 
tives in which evident falsehood was so confounded with 
merely possible fact as to cast doubt upon the whole. 
It was in effect to discredit the claim that at least Jesus 
was to be regarded as a great moral teacher, if indeed 
such a person had really lived at all. This was what 
Huxley himself saw as the result of his criticism. 

His quarrel with Christianity had begun with the 
trouble over Genesis, but it could not stop there. He 
encountered much the same thing as what had happened 
when the Church had managed to digest modern astron- 
omy. It was one of the exasperations of his later years 
to see Churchmen swallowing defeat when compelled, to 


132 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


see them giving up Genesis to the realm of myth and 
adopting naturalistic explanations of the miracles of 
Jesus, and yet go on unchangeably asserting their old 
claims to the infallible truth of the Christian religion, as 
if nothing really had occurred to disturb their position. 
And thus he came to see the issue as one between two 
fundamental principles, between authority and freedom 
of thought, as he sometimes said, or between two kinds 
of authority, legitimate and illegitimate. No one has made 
loftier claims for the supreme authority of science than 
Huxley, but he has based those claims on the position 
that the scientist can produce just warrant for his au- 
thority, whereas the priest’s claim to authority rests on 
fraud and humbug. Consequently he saw his object as 
the demolition of Christianity. Being an excellent tacti- 
cian, he did not say this directly; on the contrary, he 
habitually protested that he had no hostile feeling towards 
Christianity, but was simply contending for freedom to 
follow the path of truth wherever it might lead. Of 
course, too, this is what he was doing. But he was also 
aiming at something more than tolerance, so that his 
protests were, at the least, disingenuous. 

In 1888 he wrote a letter to Lady Welby in which, as 
he told her, he went to the root of the matter. 


Christian beliefs [he wrote] profess to be based upon histori- 
cal facts. If there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth, and 
if his biography given in the Gospels is a fiction, Christianity 
vanishes. 

Now the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of 
history is Just as much a question of pure science as the inquiry 
into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value 
of evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way. If 
any one tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in the 
Miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I frequently act 


HUXLEY 133 


every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but that it 
is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of Miocene man. 

‘Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we con- 
stantly, and in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon 
extremely bad evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts 
of penalties in consequence. And surely one must be something 
worse than a born fool to pretend that such decision under the 
pressure of the enigmas of life ought to have the smallest influ- 
ence in those judgements which are made with due and sufficient 
deliberation.° 


The root of the matter is, I suppose, twofold. Huxley 
had an interest in making Christianity vanish if he could 
because it hindered the free development of science. But 
he also had an interest in making even a tolerant Chris- 
tianity vanish because he considered it to be a funda- 
mentally immoral institution. He wanted what all of us 
want and somehow or other have to attain—certitude. 
He had a deep conviction that it made a real difference 
whether or not one accepted falsehood for truth, and, 
much more, whether or not one rested lazily content with 
unexamined beliefs. He had an unqualified hatred of all 
hypocritical professions, whether made for the sake of 
appearances, or for the sake of peace, or with some sup- 
posedly good intent. This had been brought to life in him 
by his early reading of Carlyle, particularly of Sartor 
Resartus, from which, however, he learned only what it 
suited him to learn. He could not merely drift, he could 
not take the meaning of life on trust. He could not found 
himself on anything that was even partially doubtful, 
much less on anything evidently false, but wanted to 
conduct his life on a basis of unassailable truth. In this 
he was wholly at one with Newman, or with Coleridge, 
yet for this reason he sought to demolish Christianity. 
He regarded the Church as a fundamentally immoral 

5 Life and Letters, II, 226-227, 


134 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


institution because it exercised an illegitimate authority 
and pretended to a certitude it could not properly claim. 
It deluded men with falsehoods in the name of truth. It 
depended on history for its basis; but history was a 
matter of science, and science showed that the Church’s 
so-called history was a tissue of fables and lies. More- 
over, the Church pretended to communicate knowledge 
about matters beyond the bounds of human experience, 
and this was deception, because knowledge about such 
matters is impossible. 

But knowledge of matters within the bounds of human 
experience is possible—exact, verifiable knowledge, for 
which we reserve the name science. Here, then, Huxley 
found his rock of unassailable truth. He would believe 
only what science bade him believe, and would conduct his 
life on this basis of legitimate certitude. Yet it is not alto- 
gether easy to state what, as a consequence, he did be- 
lieve, because, if he was not loose or confused in his 
thought, he was at any rate chiefly a controversial writer. 
It is, indeed, astonishing how completely his reply to 
Bishop Wilberforce exhibits within its small compass 
his qualities as an essayist and lecturer. Practically all 
of his essays are occasional in character, and a part of 
their apparent effectiveness, when taken singly, lies in 
the extent to which he succeeded in adapting his words 
to the immediate needs of the moment. But his preoccu- 
pation with momentary needs and his success in meeting 
them operated to make his expression of his views not 
only fragmentary but incoherent. It is probable that he 
himself never realized how singularly unfortunate for his 
cause in the long run was the heady stimulant of con- 
troversial success, as it is also probable that he never 
realized how difficult his position really was, because he 
never attempted to draw it out connectedly as a whole. 
As a result his readers, seeking the guidance which he 


HUXLEY 135 


professed to give, find themselves confronted with 
several Huxleys, quite different from each other, per- 
haps irreconcilable. In particular two Huxleys stand out 
prominently : one, the man who urged the cause of science 
on all occasions, the other, the man who shrewdly de- 
fended himself from attack. The difference between them 
will presently show itself. 

In the letter to Lady Welby from which I have quoted, 
Huxley admits that frequently we have to make practical 
decisions, or to act, on a basis of imperfect knowledge, 
and he adds that frequently we have to pay extreme 
penalties as a consequence. If we are wise we act from 
knowledge as much as possible, subjecting ourselves to 
chance no more than we can help. Hence our first step in 
wisdom is to realize that knowledge is a word to be used 
earefully, and that its boundaries are of the utmost im- 
portance to us. 

In seeking to define knowledge and its boundaries Hux- 
ley bids us recollect that we are born ignorant, that we 
have no inner sense or faculty which furnishes us with 
certainties concerning ourselves or our relations to this 
world or to any other. For all we know to the contrary, 
anything is possible at any time. We cannot say that 
because human beings always have died they always will; 
we cannot say that because hitherto we have not been able 
to float in the clouds at our will we shall not find our- 
selves able to do so to-morrow. There can be, in short, no 
a priort objections to any doctrine whatsoever. Hence 
such certitude as we can obtain depends wholly on con- 
erete evidence which the mind of man can clearly com- 
prehend and test. Facts, then—actual, concrete, indi- 
vidual facts—are the only certainties of life. All else may 
be more or less probable, or may be merely guesswork, 
pertaining to that limbo of speculation where nothing can 
be adduced in the way of proof or disproof. Facts alone 


136 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


are certain. Consequently knowledge is bounded by the 
range of verifiable human experience;—beyond that 
there may be an indefinite amount that we should like to 
know, but all is darkness. 

Concerning immortality Huxley wrote to Charles 
Kingsley: ‘‘I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of 
man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other 
hand, I have no means of disproving it. Pray understand 
that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man 
who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble 
himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence 
as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will 
believe that. Why should I not? It is not half as wonder- 
ful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility 
of matter. . . . But the longer I live, the more obvious it 
is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say 
and to feel, ‘I believe such and such to be true.’ All the 
oreatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of exist- 
ence cling about that act. The universe is one and the 
same throughout; and if the condition of my success in 
unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiol- 
ogy is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that 
which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe 
that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to 
me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies 
and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I be- 
lieve in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not 
rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I 
dare not if I would. Measured by this standard, what 
becomes of the doctrine of immortality?’” 

What indeed? What is the difference between not be- 
lieving something and disbelieving it? Is the difference 
much more than verbal? At any rate it can scarcely be 
pretended that it is the same thing as the simple confes- 

6 Life and Letters, I, 234. 


HUXLEY 137 


sion of ignorance which Huxley’s principles demanded, 
and it points to a difficulty in those principles which ap- 
pears more or less clearly in most of his illustrations of 
their working. To take another instance, Huxley con- 
tended that belief in demonology is inseparably bound up 
with the view-point of the writers of the Gospels, and 
that acceptance of the revelation of a spiritual world 
made in them involves belief in the existence of evil 
spirits. But, he said, the actual existence of this spiritual 
world—the value of the evidence both for this and for its 
influence upon the stream of things—are matters ‘‘which 
Jie as much within the province of science as any other 
question about the existence and powers of the varied 
forms of living and conscious activity.’’ And he added: 
“Tt really is my strong conviction that a man has no 
more right to say he believes this world is haunted by 
swarms of evil spirits, without being able to produce 
satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a right to 
say, without adducing adequate proof, that the circum- 
polar antarctic ice swarms with sea-serpents. I should 
not like to assert positively that it does not. I imagine 
that no cautious biologist would say as much; but while 
quite open to conviction, he might properly decline to 
waste time upon the consideration of talk, no better 
accredited than forecastle ‘yarns,’ about such monsters 
of the deep. And if the interests of ordinary veracity 
dictate this course, in relation to a matter of so little 
consequence as this, what must be our obligations in 
respect of the treatment of a question which is funda- 
mental alike for science and for ethics? For not only does 
our general theory of the universe and of the nature of 
the order which pervades it, hang upon the answer; but 
the rules of practical life must be deeply affected by it.’” 

Here Huxley on the whole more cautiously follows his 


7 Science and Christian Tradition, pp. xiii-xiv. 


138 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


principles than in the first illustration I quoted, yet here 
too it is difficult to see much reality in the distinction 
between not believing and disbelieving the proposition 
in question. And in fact this instance, more plainly than 
the former one, shows that the attempted distinction 
opened the way at any rate, for those who might care to 
take advantage of it, to a very disingenuous attitude. 
The refusal to deny the possible existence of those sea- 
serpents strikes me, try how I may to look at it gener- 
ously, as simply uncandid. Yet this very difficult feat 
of suspending the mind somewhere short of disbelief 
Huxley made much of, and called it agnosticism. In Sci- 
ence and Christian Tradition he tells how he came to 
coin the word. He was a member of the Metaphysical 
Society, a somewhat odd organization which Newman 
was invited to join and which included W. G. Ward and 
Cardinal Manning. Men of every shade of philosophical 
and theological opinion were gathered together in it for 
the free expression of their views, in the entirely futile 
hope that they might discover that they had more in 
common than they had supposed, and so might make a 
start towards the formulation of a comprehensive phi- 
losophy. Huxley found that most of the other members 
were -ists of some kind, while he had no name for his 
position. Despite the friendliness with which he was wel- 
comed, this gave him some of the uneasy feelings ‘‘ which 
must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the 
trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to 
his normally elongated companions.’’ Consequently he 
took thought, and invented for himself the title ‘agnos- 
tic,’ which occurred to him as ‘‘suggestively antithetic 
to the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know 
so much about the very things’’ of which he was ignorant. 
He seized the earliest opportunity of parading his new 
term at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, ‘to show 


HUXLEY 139 


that he, too, had a tail, like the other foxes,’ and he was 
highly pleased when the word took and gave promise of 
coming into general use. 

Agnosticism, then, as Huxley used it, was a confession 
of doubt or ignorance. Positively it meant, ‘Hold fast to 
definitely ascertained fact’; negatively it was equivalent 
to philosophical scepticism. And such scepticism was the 
defensive armour which Huxley constructed for himself 
after his early study of Hamilton’s essay on the uncondi- 
tioned and his later acquaintance with the writings of 
David Hume. But Hume had discovered that his scepti- 
cism vanished away the moment he quit his study and its 
atmosphere of severe reflexion, so that when he mingled 
with men, after three or four hours’ amusement he found 
it impossible to return to his speculations, so cold, and 
strained, and ridiculous did they appear. Huxley’s defen- 
sive scepticism had the like peculiarity; it too vanished 
when he went forth amongst men to teach. 

In 1890 he wrote to Sir J. G. T. Sinclair: ‘‘Only one 
absolute certainty is possible to man—namely, that at 
any given moment the feeling which he has exists... . 
We poor mortals have to be content with hope and belief 
in all matters past and present—our sole certainty is 
momentary.’’* To this point he was ready enough to 
carry his scepticism whenever need arose; yet in practice 
he was no more able to rest in it than are other men— 
perhaps less able than many, because in his champion- 
ship of science he felt himself to be a leader in a new 
crusade, and he never missed any opportunity to make 
large claims for his cause. 

He came to America in 1876, journeyed west to see his 
sister, delivered an address at the opening of the Johns 

8 Life and Letters, II, 278. It may be worth recalling that this is identi- 


cal with Walter Pater’s view, as expressed in the Conclusion of the Renais- 
sance and in Marius the Epicurean. 


140 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Hopkins University in Baltimore, and lectured on evolu- 
tion in New York. His reception in this country was, we 
are told, compared to a royal progress—with such 
veneration or curiosity did our countrymen regard him. 
And his son writes significantly in the Life and Letters 
of his father that the events of the American visit were 
‘fa sional testimony to the wide extent of his influence, 
hardly suspected, indeed, by himself; an influence due 
above all to the fact that he did not allow his studies to 
stand apart from the moving problems of existence, but 
brought the new and regenerating ideas into contact with 
life at every point, and that his championship of the new 
doctrines had at the same time been a championship of 
freedom and sincerity in thought and word against shams 
and self-deceptions of every kind. It was not so much the 
preacher of new doctrines who was welcomed, as the 
apostle of veracity—not so much the student of science 
as the teacher of men.’’ 

‘‘The teacher of men’’—certainly, one feels, Huxley 
had a very strong inclination to assume that rodle, and 
unquestionably he was so regarded. ‘‘The teacher of 
men’’—the words bring before the mind’s eye a strong, 
positive figure, preaching with absolute conviction no 
mere chilling and sceptical negations, but a new gospel 
filled with regenerating ideas about the actual problems 
of life. What were these regenerating ideas resting on 
adequate evidence? What conception of life was to re- 
place the shams and self-deceptions of men? Strictly he 
could assure men of only one certainty, of which they 
scarcely needed to be told—the certainty that at any 
given moment the feelings they had existed. But beyond 
this he could and did, with wonderful impressiveness and 
complete personal conviction, go on to build up, on inade- 
quate evidence, an interpretation of life suggested partly 
by science, partly by qualities of his own temperament, 


HUXLEY 141 


as in consonance with this single initial certainty. And 
this interpretation he used all his great powers to im- 
press upon his readers and hearers as indisputably true. 

The universe, he taught, consists of phenomena stretch- 
ing backward one knows not how far, yet never the same, 
always changing, constant only in change, phenomena 
succeeding each other in invariable trains of succession. 
For convenience we distinguish the phenomena as or- 
ganic and inorganic, but in reality there is no fast line 
between inorganic matter and vegetable life, no fast line 
between vegetable and animal life, and no essential dif- 
ference between the two most general classes. All organic 
life from the human being to the rock-lichen is funda- 
mentally one and has for its essential constituent proto- 
plasm, which is resolvable into its inorganic elements. 
All organic life in its present variety and complexity has 
developed through vast reaches of time from one simple 
ultimate form, and at no stage whatsoever of this de- 
velopment has there been any violent break in or shadow 
of interference with the chain of necessary, regular, 
natural causation. ‘‘The universe is one and the same 
throughout.’’ Hence we are as much as the rocks we walk 
on, the air we breathe, or the vermin we kill, parts of the 
same natural order. | 

Further, while human consciousness is real, it is some- 
thing we share with the animals. We can trace it as one 
and the same thing from almost imperceptible beginnings 
in very simple organisms through an ascending scale, 
where we see it gradually extending in scope until it 
culminates in ourselves. And, though real, consciousness 
is merely an epiphenomenon, which is to say that it is 
merely an accompaniment of molecular changes and has 
no slightest influence on our movements or actions, and 
no slightest influence on the course of our lives, which 
for all we can see might—and in some cases of physical 


142 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


injury to the brain apparently do—go on as well without 
it as with it. Concerning this [ must quote some sentences 
from the volume of essays entitled Method and Results. 
‘“We have,’’ Huxley says, ‘‘no knowledge of any think- 
ing substance, apart from extended substance; and . . 
thought is as much a function of matter as motion is. 
. . IT hold, with the Materialist, that the human body, 
like all living bodies, is a machine, all the operations of 
which will, sooner or later, be explained on physical 
principles. I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive 
at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we 
have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. If a 
pound weight falling through a distance of a foot gives 
rise to a definite amount of heat, which may properly 
be said to be its equivalent; the same pound weight 
falling through a foot on a man’s hand gives rise to a 
definite amount of feeling, which might with equal pro- 
priety be said to be its equivalent in consciousness.’’ 
Later in the same volume we are told that ‘‘the con- 
sciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the 
mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product 
of its working, and to be as completely without any power 
of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which 
accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without 
influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have 
any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a 
cause of such changes. . . . To the best of my judgement, 
the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally 
good of men; and, therefore, . . . all states of conscious- 
ness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecu- 
lar changes of the brain-substance. It seems to me that 
in men, as in brutes, there 1s no proof that any state of 
consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the 
matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, 
it follows that our mental conditions are simply the sym- 


HUXLEY 143 


bols in consciousness of the changes which take place 
automatically in the organism; and that, to take an ex- 
treme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the 
cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of 
the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We 
are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the 
only intelligible sense of that much-abused term—inas- 
much as in many respects we are able to do as we like— 
but none the less parts of the great series of causes and 
effects which, in unbroken continuity, compose that which 
is, and has been, and shall be—the sum of existence.’’ 

In what sense automata can be said to do as they like 
I am unable to see. It makes no difference that they can 
do so only in some respects. To do so at all implies a 
genuine choice, which in turn implies a true volitional 
agent. Hither the admission is a fundamental contradic- 
tion or it is meaningless. Moreover, Huxley goes on to 
discuss human life in terms which everywhere imply that 
we are in fact capable of genuine choices; and thus he 
unwittingly emphasizes, beyond possibility of mistake, 
his own sense of the falsity of his assertion that there has 
never been, and can never be, any violent or unaccount- 
able break in the chain of necessary, regular, natural 
causation. The existence of a single volitional agent is 
an unaccountable anomaly in Huxley’s unitary natural 
order. 

He tells us, as I have already said, that we are born 
ignorant. Brutes are born in a state of satisfactory har- 
mony with their environment, but with us it is not so. We 
are, however, fortunately able by the application of 
scientific method to learn something about the workings 
of surrounding phenomena, which makes it possible for 
us, the more we learn, the better to conform ourselves 
to the nature of things. And life itself, not to speak of 
material well-being and peace of mind, depends upon our 


144 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


success in getting adequate guidance and in following it 
when we do get it. ‘‘My business,’’ Huxley wrote to 
Kingsley, ‘‘is to teach my aspirations to conform them- 
selves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with 
my aspirations. . . . Sit down before fact as a little 
child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, 
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature 
leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to 
learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at 
all risks to do this.’’ 

And material well-being, as well as content and peace 
of mind, follows upon entire surrender to the guidance 
of nature. For thus we acquire much practically useful 
knowledge. In his famous lecture on The Advisableness 
of Improving Natural Knowledge Huxley recalls the 
Plague and Great Fire of London which occurred in the 
1660’s, and points out that the practically complete 
absence of any danger of the recurrence of those calami- 
ties is due simply to our increased knowledge of nature, 
which has also put at our command instruments of wealth 
and convenience of untold number and value. Accordingly 
he concludes that the improvement of natural knowledge 
is ‘‘a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to 
mankind, in comparison with which the damage’’ done 
by fire and famine and plague shrinks ‘‘into insignifi- 
eance.’’ 

But not only does nature become for us, in proportion 
as we learn and conform to her ways, ‘‘a sort of comfort- 
erinding machine’’; she is in the fullest sense ‘‘the boun- 
tiful mother of humanity,’’ ‘‘bringing them up with kind- 
ness, and, if need be, with sternness, in the way they 
should go, and instructing them in all things needful for 
their welfare.’’ For the improvement of natural knowl- 
edge has done far more than confer practical benefits 

9 Life and Letters, I, 235. 


HUXLEY 145 


on men. While they intelligently sought comfort and 
wealth, they unawares turned up knowledge which also 
brought about a revolution in their conception of the 
universe and of themselves, and which has wonderfully 
changed their ways of thinking and their notions of right 
and wrong. ‘‘I say,’’? Huxley adds, ‘‘that natural knowl- 
edge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the 
ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that 
natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of 
comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, 
and to lay the foundations of a new morality.’’ 

The doctrine of automatism, so far as it found accept- 
ance, should effectually still spiritual cravings, though 
this, I suppose, is not what Huxley consciously meant. 
He meant rather that preoccupation with natural knowl- 
edge tends to turn men’s minds from what he would have 
called the blunder or crime of other-worldly speculations 
and aspirations and to subdue their spirits to the physi- 
cal realities that now are, to the work of bettering earthly 
life ;—‘‘intelligent work is the only acceptable wor- 
ship.’’?° 

As for the new morality, he had in mind lessons taught 
both by the methods and by the discoveries of science. 
The ‘‘moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous 
and semi-barbarous people’’ are, that ‘‘authority is the 
soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readi- 
ness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad 
one, and scepticism a sin; that when good authority has 
pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted 
it, reason has no further duty.’’ But the fact is that the 
increase of natural knowledge is brought about only by 
‘‘methods which directly give the lie to all these convic- 
tions, and assume the exact reverse of each to be true.’’ 


10 Science and Christian Tradition, p. 38. 


146 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


The scientist ‘‘absolutely refuses to acknowledge au- 
thority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of 
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.’’* 
Further, science gives a new solidity to moral precepts 
by exhibiting to men concretely the real grounds for 
prudential conduct. Huxley speaks of this in a letter 
about some lectures to working-men which he delivered 
in 1855: ‘‘T want the working classes to understand that 
Science and her ways are great facts for them—that 
physical virtue is the basis of all other, and that they are 
to be clean and temperate and all the rest—not because 
fellows in black with white ties tell them so, but because 
these are plain and patent laws of nature which they 
must obey ‘under penalties.’ ’’’ Science, moreover, ex- 
hibits not only the character of these penalties, but the 
rightness or justice of the whole eternal plan of which 
they form a part. We read, in a letter to Kingsley from 
which I have already quoted, ‘‘I am no optimist, but I 
have the firmest belief that the Divine Government (if 
we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the 
‘customs of matter’) is wholly just. The more I know 
intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of 
my own), the more obvious it is to me that the wicked 
does not flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for 
this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all 
forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obe- 
dience to the whole law—physical as well as moral—and 
that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or 
vice versa. . . . Life cannot exist without a certain con- 
formity to the surrounding universe—that conformity 
involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. 
In short, as we live we are paid for living. . . . The 


11 Method and Results, p. 40. 
12 Life and Letters, I, 149. 


HUXLEY 147 


absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me 
as any scientific fact.’’ 

Finally, science brings to light and emphasizes as it 
has never been emphasized before the fundamental basis 
of morality. The student of science learns in his heart 
of hearts, as it cannot be learned in any other way, that 
‘‘the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for 
all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for 
which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible 
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of 
knowledge.’’ The student of science knows, as does no 
one else, what the real sanction of morality is. He knows 
that the safety of morality does not depend on the adop- 
tion of any philosophical speculation or any theological 
creed, but on ‘‘a real and living belief in that fixed order 
of nature which sends social disorganization upon the 
track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease 
after physical trespasses.’’* 

On the other hand, Huxley did not believe that the 
course of evolution was bringing ever nearer an earthly 
paradise, to be inhabited by physically, mentally, and 
morally perfect men, such as was prophesied by Herbert 
Spencer; nor did he think, with the positivists and 
eugenists, that the indefinite further improvement of 
humanity could be effected by the deliberate application 
to society of the methods of the ‘cosmic process’ as these 
were revealed by science. Natural selection was wasteful 
and cruel, and civilized man had done well in practically 
nullifying it; nor could it be replaced by artificial selec- 
tion, because the knowledge needed for determining and 
applying selective standards was unobtainable. Here and 
in other connexions Huxley showed that it was not so 
much a new morality as a revision of existing morality 


13 Life and Letters, I, 236. 
14 Kvolution and Ethics, etc., p. 146. 


148 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


and a change in its sanctions that he thought science was 
bringing about. His utterances on the subject cannot in 
any way be reconciled with each other, but it would ap- 
pear that he followed an inner guidance, similar to Cole- 
ridge’s method of detecting the inspired portions of the 
Bible. He assumed that the moral compulsions and ad- 
mirations which he found actually operative within him- 
self, and hence presumably within other equally good 
men, were a satisfactory product of evolution. In some 
cases, as for instance in the case of the sceptical attitude, 
science gave him clear ground for regarding as virtuous 
what for one reason or another others had regarded, or 
still did regard, as vicious. Again, certain virtues, such as 
temperance, cleanliness, and the like, science gave him 
good reasons for, whereas previously they had been 
preached on merely fantastic grounds. But, in addition, 
there were other ethical ideals about which science, he 
thought, was simply silent. He contemptuously repudi- 
ated the ‘religion of humanity’ ;—he would, he said, just 
as soon bow down and worship a ‘‘wilderness of apes.’’ 
Yet he considered that humanitarian sympathy, stoical 
strength, patience, ‘ethical purity and nobility,’ devotion 
to the service of society, carried if need be to the point 
of martyrdom—that these made up an ethical ideal of 
duty with an absolute sanction. If religion were properly 
understood it would consist simply of reverence and love 
for this ethical ideal, and of the desire to realize it in 
life ‘‘which every man ought to feel.’? Why ought men 
to feel it? Huxley does not say. He cannot tell. He merely 
asserts that his words are ‘‘surely indisputable.’’ 

This is sufficiently curious, though it can be explained. 
Science could not help Huxley to account for his ‘pure 
intuition’ of the ethical ideal of duty, yet he had no other 
source of information. Consequently, since he had within 
him indubitable witness to its existence, he could only 


HUXLEY 149 


say that it was self-evident. He could not take a single 
step towards motivating this characteristic of humanity 
or. towards relating it to other human characteristics. 
But, however mysterious, its existence was ‘‘surely indis- 
putable.’”° And this enables us to see why Huxley in his 
later years was irritated both by those who were on 
evolutionary grounds prophesying the near approach of 
the millennium and by others who were utilizing the 
methods of the ‘cosmic process’ to justify a ‘‘fanatical 
individualism.’’ In his Romanes lecture on Evolution and 
Ethics he turned on these false prophets and advocates 
of ‘‘reasoned savagery’’ and told them that no ethical 
principles can be learned from the natural universe. On 
the contrary, he said, it is the self-evident fact that the 
ethical ideal of duty has to be pursued even though in this 
world, as all men know and agree, the wicked and the 
unjust flourish while righteous men are punished.** And 
he asserted that there is one law for things and another 
law for men. But it is not merely that man’s ways are 
different from nature’s ways, for man’s moral character 
not only finds no analogy in the order of nature but is 
radically opposed to that order. ‘The cosmic process has 
no sort of relation to moral ends; the imitation of it by 


15 Huxley says that Sartor Resartus led him ‘‘to know that a deep sense 
of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology.’’ (Life and 
Letters, I, 237.) It was a lesson for which he had small reason to feel 
grateful, as otherwise he might not have been so easily tempted to uphold 
by sheer force an ideal of duty which was meaningless on his own view of 
life. 

16 ‘‘Tf there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has 
the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator 
of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that 
the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while the righteous begs his 
bread; that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; that, in 
the realm of nature, ignorance is punished just as severely as wilful wrong; 
and that thousands upon thousands of innocent beings suffer for the crime, 
or the unintentional trespass, of one.’’ (Hvolution and Ethics, etc., p. 58.) 


150 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


man is inconsistent with the first principles of ethics.’ 
Consequently ‘‘the ethical progress of society depends, 
not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running 
away from it, but in combating it.’’*” 

What are we to make of this, when we remember that 
‘the universe is one and the same throughout’’? In the 
face of this uncompromising dualism what has become 
of that unitary natural order, ‘‘the sum of existence,’’ of 
which men ineluctably form a part? The Romanes lecture 
at once caused a great outcry, and Huxley’s friends and 
enemies united to ask him these and similar difficult ques- 
tions. He himself, obedient as always to the immediate 
needs of the moment, had not realized just what he was 
doing. In the preface to the second edition of the lecture 
he admitted as much, though he characteristically covered 
the admission by accusing all of his readers collectively 
of ‘invincible ignorance.’ However, in the same edition 
he set about repairing the damage as well as he could in 
a ‘‘Prolegomena’’ longer than the lecture itself. In effect 
he pointed out that it was not the task of science to 
explain or reconcile facts, but to describe them. It was 
not his business to answer insoluble questions, or to pene- 
trate the mystery which surrounds existence, but simply 
to be faithful to the facts as they actually are. The facts 
are that although ‘‘man, physical, intellectual, and moral, 
is as much a part of nature, as purely a product of the 
cosmic process, as the humblest weed,’’ nevertheless his 
ethical character is in complete antagonism with its 
parent. If this is an inconceivable proposition, so much 
the worse for reason, because the facts are so.** He also 

17 Evolution and Ethics, etc., p. 83. On pp. 81-82 Huxley says: ‘‘The 
practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue— 
involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which 


leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.’’ (Italics mine.) 
18 Ibid., pp. 11-12. 


HUXLEY | 151 


drew out an analogy, using the case of the gardener who 
combats the ‘cosmic process’ in order to grow fruits and 
flowers. The analogy doubtless helps, if help is needed, 
to show that ‘the facts are so,’ but that is all. For it begs 
the question at issue, and it leaves all the other contra- 
dictions between Huxley’s latest position and his earlier 
utterances exactly where they were. 


Clearly the ‘‘apostle of veracity’’ and ‘‘teacher of 
men’’ had a more difficult task than he realized. He set 
out to clear away the shadows cast by ancient and respect- 
able shams, to let the light of truth shine upon men with- 
out obstruction. Nothing could be better, as all would 
agree. And success was to be his because he had a new 
method unparalleled for simplicity and efficieney. He 
would simply use common sense. He would give the name 
of truth only to that which could be fully tested and veri- 
fied, and about all else he would frankly confess his igno- 
rance. Knowledge was a sacred word; he would reverence 
it properly by safeguarding its use. He would show men 
that by following his simple rule of taking nothing on 
trust, of demanding adequate, concrete, objective evi- 
dence, of building only on results so confirmed, they 
would arrive at a sure and genuine understanding of life. 
It is amazing enough, this all too simple plan, yet it 
should be remembered that even the best of men might 
easily have been dazzled by the triumphs of science in the 
middle years of the nineteenth century when Huxley was 
entering into his career. And to a young man with a one- 
sided training in science, innocent alike of religion and of 
philosophy, full of headlong self-confidence, not seriously 
or deeply reflective, and eager to leave his mark on the 
world, it was probably inevitable that the ‘improvement 
of natural knowledge’ should seem the royal road, for- 


152 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


tunately just opened up, to the one final, true interpreta- 
tion of life. 

Huxley accepted it as such. It was a great, enthusiastic 
act of faith, and of blind faith, too. For while he supposed 
he was taking the path to knowledge, with entirely open 
and unprejudiced mind, he was in reality swearing alle- 
giance to a particular, specialized kind of knowledge. He 
was undertaking to accept only one kind of evidence, to 
take a sectarian view of reality, to see life in terms of its 
external, sensible forms. He was committing himself to 
the view that ‘‘the universe is one and the same through- 
out.’’ And concurrently ‘the absolute justice of the sys- 
tem of things became as clear to him as any scientific 
fact.’ These were the prejudices in which he tied himself. 
This was the self-deception lurking unconsciously within 
his heart. For he already knew that he had the truth 
within him, although he enrolled himself as an ignorant 
and humble inguirer. This was the dogmatism with which 
he armed himself—to take the field against all dogma- 
tists. An unconscious, unexamined, uncriticized dogma- 
tism could blind Huxley to evidence and to the meaning 
of evidence as surely as it ever blinded any victim of 
vulgar superstition—and it did. His scepticism, had it 
ever been honest and thorough, would here have served 
him well. But he used it only as a tool, as a fighting 
weapon, as a retreat when difficulties threatened, as a 
means of escape from rigorous thought—he used it, in 
short, when it suited him and carefully shielded from it 
his sacred verities. 

Those verities and his own purposes in life were above 
examination and criticism. The former bade him look 
outside of himself for the truth, and find it in the appear- 
ances of things. The roar of the tiger, his body springing 
at one through the air, his teeth buried in one’s writhing 


HUXLEY 153 


flesh—there was something unmistakable, indubitable, 
real. There could be no question of self-deception, of sub- 
jective imaginary vapourings in that. It has ever been the 
inevitable starting-point of common sense. Yet where did 
it lead? It led to dust and ashes, to the doctrine of au- 
tomatism, to the doctrine of the absolute rightness of all 
things as they are, to a dehumanized world of things, 
from which people had vanished as surely as their illu- 
sions. This was the further end of objectivity—as violent 
a contradiction of common sense as ever brain-sick fool 
propounded. Huxley dutifully preached it; as far as 
words could go he said it was the truth and the whole 
truth; and it is the only coherent form of naturalism to 
be found in his writings. Yet, as we have seen, even while 
he preached it and did what he could to help impress it 
upon his generation, he himself recoiled from his own 
picture and rendered it, in reality, only an equivocal lip- 
service. It made life meaningless; it opened up a hideous 
abyss, without bottom, infinite, which swallowed all 
human purposes, duties, activities, loves, hates, the whole 
human content of existence, and left us nothing ;—noth- 
ing save, indeed, that with which we had started, the 
regular necessary sequences of matter in endless motion. 
But it was in obedience to the command of duty, and with 
the purpose of serving the cause of truth and so liberat- 
ine men from unworthy bondage, that Huxley had begun 
the journey which carried him into the bottomless abyss. 
And this obedience and this purpose too were real; he 
had direct ‘indisputable’ testimony to them from within 
himself. Hence he incontinently turned about and pro- 
claimed that ‘iron necessity’ was a mere figment of the 
mind, and happily proceeded to drive home those moral 
lessons—selfish counsels of prudence for the most part— 
to be learned from science, which were always so close to 
his heart. Yet he continued nevertheless to uphold natu- 


154 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ralism; the universe was still one and the same through- 
out. 

Such wilful inconsequence it is which makes it a vain 
attempt to give any coherent outline of what Huxley 
stood for. He stood, indeed, for ‘truths’ which exclude 
or destroy each other, for propositions meaningless in 
the form in which he held them, for impossibilities. So 
far as his inconsistencies did not spring from his obvious 
limitations as a thinker, they came, it would appear, from 
the fact that he chiefly wrote as a propagandist and con- 
troversialist fighting for a cause to which he had uncon- 
ditionally committed himself. It was not his own views 
which required examination and sifting, but those of his 
opponents; what his own views required was whole- 
hearted advocacy, or justification of the ‘crushing’ vari- 
ety. This was a situation which promoted dexterity and 
adroitness in thinking rather than care and thorough- 
ness. In addition, he wrote for immediate needs, and for 
special audiences and causes; he wrote hurriedly; he felt 
at times, apparently, that any stick would do with which 
to beat the dog; and at other times he seems to have felt 
that, for the sake of appearing to overreach his opponent 
in his own virtues, a little in the way of consistency might 
well be temporarily sacrificed. Doubtless, too, his success 
in controversy encouraged in him his astonishing self- 
confidence. It was his life-long conviction that all who 
differed from him must be hypocrites, humbugs, or liars. 
This was a great source of strength, of course, in beating 
down opponents, but it caused R. H. Hutton to suspect 
that Huxley must have been inoculated with papal infalli- 
bility, and it certainly implies a temper very different 
from that of the seeker after truth. At times it seems, 
indeed, as if he felt so confident that the truth was 
already within him that he could venture boldly to play 
fast and loose with it. 


HUXLEY 155 


This is to end on a harsh note. Yet I have no wish to 
minimize Huxley’s unusual gifts as a writer or to belittle 
his honest purpose in attacking superstition and preju- 
dice. In many of his battles he stood, at a time when it 
required great courage and promised no reward save 
his own consciousness of integrity, for what we all now 
take to be the truth. No one now doubts the fact of evolu- 
tion, even though many perplexing questions surround 
it and its meaning, and this momentous change of opinion 
is in large part Huxley’s work. Every one now agrees 
that the stories of the creation, temptation, and flood in 
Genesis are myths, and for this too Huxley is largely 
responsible. And these are two only out of a not incon- 
siderable number of cases where he accomplished his aim 
in such fashion as to set his mark indelibly on the history 
of popular thought. But besides pricking certain bubbles 
of delusion and popularizing certain discoveries of sci- 
ence Huxley undertook the larger and graver task of 
formulating a theory of knowledge and an interpretation 
of life in naturalistic terms. It is his success in this en- 
deavour which I have sought to determine, as much as 
possible by letting him speak for himself. And it is a 
matter of very great importance that, if his unmistakable 
though unwilling testimony is to be trusted, a purely 
naturalistic interpretation of human life is an impossi- 
bility. 


Vs 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 


Arnon began his literary career as a poet. Had he not 
been without money, or had he been as patient in poverty 
and singleness of life as was Tennyson, he might have 
brought to fruition the full measure of his high poetical 
aims. About that it is useless to speculate. The facts are 
that he did have to depend for his livelihood upon what 
he could earn, and that a few years after he had secured 
his Oxford degree he was anxious to take the shortest 
course to marriage with Miss Lucy Wightman. He de- 
sired a diplomatic post, but the future in that direction 
was uncertain, and in 1851 he obtained through Lord 
Lansdowne an inspectorship of schools, a position which 
he filled until within two years of his death. The work 
was exacting and uncongenial. In time he became more 
or less reconciled to it, realizing its importance. It gave 
him, too, opportunities for some of the best and wisest 
writing on education which was published during his 
century. But it also consumed his time and energy, and 
made it impossible for him to throw himself as he wished 
into the composition of poetry. He long persevered in 
the attempt, and even in the last years of his life kept 
hoping still to complete poetical designs formed twenty 
or thirty years before; but actually he wrote less and less 
with each year after 1851, and very little indeed after 
1861. 

He did not ascribe his failure entirely to the work with 
the schools. ‘‘ We are not here to have facilities found us 
for dog the work we like, but to make them,’’ he wrote; 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 157 


and he felt that had he lived in a different age he might 
have succeeded in transcending all the difficulties of his 
work. But his age was one of a great transition, making 
itself felt in social life, in politics, in religion, in every 
sphere of thought and activity, while men around him 
were blind, if not to the occurrence of change, at any rate 
to its nature and its necessity. They closed their eyes to 
facts; they were unmoved by surrounding ugliness and 
squalor; they were content with mediocrity, with make- 
shifts, with nostrums. They lagged far behind the rest of 
Kurope in their realization of what was taking place, and 
in consequence they met new conditions and demands 
unintelligently; but, self-satisfied and prosperous, they 
spent their time in continual applause of themselves and | 
in self-gratulation upon their unparalleled virtues. And | 
thus it was that there existed no clear, undivided current | 
of national life and faith, such as was necessary to sup- 
port a great age of literature, but instead endless con- 
fused cross-currents of ancient prejudice, of mistaken 
belief, of mere stupidity, of triumphant demagogy, of 
unbridled desire to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister— 
of what indeed not? Hence men could not know rightly 
where they stood or why, and poetry could not flourish, 
because a poet might as well attempt to work in a vacuum 
as in a chaos of confused and warring elements. So Ar- 
nold felt ;—he felt that poetry required the stimulus of a 
community united in clear vision of things as they are 
and in a stirring and confident faith resulting from such 
vision. 

Balked of his aim and true vocation, then, by the intel- 
lectual and spiritual poverty of his age, Arnold turned 
to what he could do. With stoical resignation he went 
about amongst the schools, and learned to know the life 
of the middle and lower classes, while he meditated the 
needs of England. And with his election to the chair of 


158 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


poetry at Oxford in 1857 he began to voice his conclu- 
sions. He became a critic of literature, of education, of 
society, of politics, of religion; and he endeavoured thus, 
if he could not continue with poetry himself, to fashion in 
England a fitter home for some poet of the future. He 
made himself heard. Under the grateful sunlight of pub- 
lie recognition he grew in strength and confidence, and 
he thoroughly enjoyed both his work and his success. 

It is not my object to attempt any review of Arnold’s 
work as a whole, but to inquire into his religious position. 
For this a convenient starting-point is afforded by Mr. 
Stuart P. Sherman’s assertion that Arnold was, ‘‘to 
begin with, innately and profoundly religious.’ Mr. 
Sherman, at first sight rather oddly, quotes the poem 
entitled The Buried Life to support his claim. Rather 
oddly, because in this poem Arnold, after saying that 
there is that in man, his innermost spirit, which, could he 
question it, might truly tell him the meaning of life, but 
which for ever just eludes him and sends him searching 
for the saving truth on a thousand false tracks—after 
saying this he goes on to conclude that man may find 
his true self most clearly if he has the rare fortune to be 
able to read it in the eyes of one who loves him. The poem 
is not obviously a religious one, yet Mr. Sherman rightly 
presents it as evidence that Arnold, when a young man, 
went through a period of what he calls religious disillu- 
sionment. Arnold’s poetry shows, not that he had any 
definite religious faith when we first get sight of him, 
but that he keenly felt the lack of it. The pleasures of 
Christian certitude he had known, but he had found the 
traditional faith ill-based and hollow, so that for a time 
he was as one lost in a pathless wild. In The Buried Life, 
then, we have expressed Arnold’s sense of the inevitable 


1 Matthew Arnold, How to Know Him, p. 64. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 159 


frustration of men’s hopes in their search for the truth 
of their being, with, yet, the possibility somewhat am- 
biguously held out that this search may at times be re- 
warded, if anywhere, in a man’s sense of unity with one 
whom he loves. This deeply hidden secret which men un- 
ceasingly, yet so vainly, attempt to discover is, of course, 
just what Christianity, or any other religion, claims to 
lay bare for us. 

Other poems tell the story more explicitly. In Dover 
Beach, as the poet stands gazing at the calm sea through 
the night air, he hears ‘‘the eternal note of sadness’’ in 


The grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At their return, up the high strand, 
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
With tremulous cadence slow. 


He recalls that Sophocles heard the same sound long ago, 
and so was made to think of the ‘‘turbid ebb and flow of 
human misery,’’ while he, standing by the distant north- 
ern waves, finds in it another thought: 


The sea of faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 

But now I only hear 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. 


Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 


160 


CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 


Again, in his Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 
Arnold describes his ascent and the monastery on its 
Alpine heights, and then turns to ask what is he, that he 
is in this place?— 


For rigorous teachers seized my youth, 
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, 
Showed me the high, white star of Truth, 
There bade me gaze, and there aspire. 
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: 
What dost thou in this living tomb? 


Forgive me, masters of the mind! 

At whose behest I long ago 

So much unlearnt, so much resigned— 
I come not here to be your foe! 

I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, 
To curse and to deny your truth; 


Not as their friend, or child, I speak! 
But as, on some far northern strand, 
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek 

In pity and mournful awe might stand 
Before some fallen Runic stone— 

For both were faiths, and both are gone. 


Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born, 

With nowhere yet to rest my head, 

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 

Their faith, my tears, the world deride— 
I come to shed them at their side. 


Clearly to him who wrote Dover Beach and the Stanzas 
from the Grande Chartreuse Christianity was not merely 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 161 


a dead faith, it had been when living a delusion, promis- 
ing what it could not give. There was not certitude, nor 
peace, nor help for pain; and what Christianity had pre- 
tended to offer was in its fulness nowhere to be found. 
What of ease for his troubled spirit man might gain, he 
could gain, if anywhere beyond himself, only within the 
circle of this world in merely human relationships. 
Clearly, too, Arnold was not sanguine even as to this. 
In The Buried Infe his tone is doubtful, his words not 
wholly unambiguous. In Dover Beach and the Stanzas 
from the Grande Chartreuse he speaks more definitely, 
but less hopefully, and we are told that none of the sons 
of men can reveal any hidden secrets. Even as we our- 
selves, men have no final, saving truths to tell; they can 
only give us the solace that comes of knowing we do not 
stand alone in our trouble. Elsewhere Arnold returns to 
the subject of love, disillusioned, without hope for any 
release of man’s veiled and imprisoned spirit. In one of 
the poems collected under the title Switzerland he tells 
us that men never have more than dreamed that ‘‘two 
human hearts might blend in one’’ and be ‘‘through faith 
released from isolation without end,’’ for, 


In the sea of life enisled, 

With echoing straits between us thrown, 
Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 

We mortal millions live alone. 


Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass 
Upon the boundless ocean-plain, 

So on the sea of life, alas! 

Man meets man—meets, and quits again— 


while it is ordained by a fate which knows no turning 
that between men should ever be 


The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea. 


162 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Evidently those ‘‘masters of the mind,’’ those ‘‘rigor- 
ous teachers,’’ who seized Arnold’s youth, while they 
took from him the certitude which Christianity had given 
his forbears, put nothing very positive in its place. It was 
a kind. of naturalism which they offered him, and so com- 
pletely did it win his acceptance that he wrote as if its 
absolute truth could be taken for granted, as if it must 
be self-evident immediately it was presented to the mind. 
In this sense it was a doctrine positive enough in all 
conscience, and as final to his mind as any accepted dog- 
matism to the minds of his ignorant or deluded elders. 
But, nevertheless, in the beginning at any rate, it put 
nothing in the place where Christian faith had been, but 
left its convert feeling himself adrift, without guide and 
without light. It was not to another world of faith that 
he turned, it was to wander ‘‘between two worlds, one 
dead, the other powerless to be born.’’ And Arnold wan- 
dered disconsolately because, though he did not even 
slightly hesitate to follow his masters in adjudging Chris- 
tianity to be no longer possible for a rigorous and sincere 
mind, still, he continued to be conscious of needs and 
questionings which had to remain unsatisfied and unan- 
swered. 

Whether or not this was a consequence of Arnold’s 
‘innate and profound’ religious sense is a question which 
the character of his later thought must itself answer. 
Meanwhile it may be asked who were his ‘‘rigorous 
teachers’’ and what was their quarrel with Christianity? 
Arnold himself answers these questions, not exhaus- 
tively, but sufficiently, in his essay on Heinrich Heine. 
He tells us that Heine, despite all those faults of char- 
acter which kept both his life and his work below the 
level of his inborn genius, was, still, Goethe’s most im- 
portant German successor and continuator in Goethe’s 
most important line of activity. What was this line of 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 163 


activity? Goethe’s own words are quoted for an answer: 
‘‘Tf I were to say what I had really been to the Germans 
in general, and to the young German poets in particular, 
I should say I had been their liberator.’’ Arnold goes on 
to say that modern peoples find themselves the inheritors 
from a former age of an immense system of ‘‘institu- 
tions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, 
rules.’’ Their own life has to be carried forward in this 
system, yet they inevitably feel that it is something not 
their own, that it fails to correspond with their own 
actual wants, that, indeed, for them it is customary, not 
rational. This feeling is the awakening of the modern 
spirit—a spirit now almost everywhere awake. Almost 
every one now perceives the want of correspondence ‘‘be- 
tween the forms of modern Hurope and its spirit, be- 
tween the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth.’’ It 
is no longer dangerous to proclaim this want of corre- 
spondence; people, in fact, even begin to feel shy of 
denying it. And to remove it is beginning to be the de- 
liberate effort of most persons of good sense. 

We are told, further, that ‘‘dissolvents of the old 
Huropean system of dominant ideas and facts’’ all who 
have any power of working must nowadays be. And 
Goethe was the grand dissolvent in an age when there 
were fewer of them than in the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century. Goethe himself is allowed to explain how 
he proceeded in his task of liberating modern European 
people from their outworn routine. ‘‘Through me,’’ he 
says, ‘‘the German poets have become aware that, as man 
must live from within outwards, so the artist must work 
from within outwards, seeing that, make what contor- 
tions he will, he ean only bring to light his own individu- 
ality.’’ This should be thought no impotent conclusion 


164 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


to his declaration that he had been the liberator of the 
Germans, because it really goes to the heart of the mat- 
ter. ‘‘Goethe’s profound, imperturbable naturalism is 
absolutely fatal to all routine thinking; he puts the stand- 
ard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; 
when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense 
authority and custom in favour of its being so, it has been 
held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with 
Olympian politeness, ‘But zs it so? is it so to me?’ Noth- 
ing could be more really subversive of the foundations on 
which the old European order rested; and it may be that 
no persons are so radically detached from this order, no 
persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt 
Goethe’s influence most deeply.’’ 

In a letter to Cardinal Newman which has been pub- 
lished only recently Arnold said: ‘‘There are four peo- 
ple, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having 
learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a 
strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, 
which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, 
Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself.’ I pass over 
for the present the oddness of these juxtapositions—Ar- 
nold, of course, himself recognized it—because it seems 
fair, without implying that the influence of the others 
named was unimportant, to single out Goethe as the type 
of those ‘‘masters of the mind’’ who formed his thought 
and gave him his direction. And from the essay on Heine 
we have seen what that direction was. Hssentially it was 
the exercise of that ‘right and duty of private judgement’ 
which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had 
linked Protestantism, however unwillingly or uncon- 
sciously, with the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a re- 

2 The letter was first published in the Times Literary Supplement (Lon- 


don), March, 1921. It is printed in Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold 
(1923), p. 65. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 165 


volt against all external authority, no matter how an- 
cient, august, or widely received. It, undermined the 
foundations of the church equally as well as those of neo- 
classical criticism. It was the assertion that all institu- 
tions, standards, ideas, were within the sphere of indi- 
vidual scrutiny, and were not only subject to change, but 
to annihilation, at the individual’s will. 

It is a question how much the quality of Arnold’s 
thought changed as he grew older. Many readers feel a 
pronounced difference between his poetry and his prose, 
and when one encounters this feeling one is perforce re- 
minded of the meagreness of our information concerning 
his, earlier years. It is impossible to determine in any 
final way how quickly, once he had begun, he became 
genuinely conscious of the direction of his thought. He 
himself felt that he had matured very slowly, but this 
alone hardly answers the question.® It is highly probable, 
moreover, on many grounds, that he was to some real 
extent conscious and self-critical from the beginning; 
and it is, at any rate, unquestionably true that the differ- 
ence between his poetry and his prose is almost entirely 
one of mood, not one of substance. In his earlier period 
he was conscious chiefly of the negative bearings of those 
propositions of whose truth he felt assured, and the con- 
sequence was a sense of deep oppression, not only be- 
cause he felt himself loosed upon a pathless wild, but 
because in the midst of a chaos he could not effectually 
turn his powers to the uses of poetry. This is illustrated 
by a remarkable passage in a letter which he wrote to his 
sister, Mrs. Forster, probably in 1853: ‘‘Fret not your- 
self to make my poems square in all their parts... . 
The true reason why parts suit you while others do not 
is that my poems are fragments—.e. that I am frag- 
ments, while you are a whole; the whole effect of my 

8 See the Letters, edited by G. W. E. Russell, I, 247-248. 


166 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


poems is quite vague and indeterminate—this is their 
weakness; a person therefore who endeavoured to make 
them accord would only lose his labour; and a person 
who has any inward completeness can at best only like 
parts of them; in fact such a person stands firmly and 
knows what he is about while the poems stagger weakly 
and are at their wits’ end.’” 

Arnold adds that he would not be so frank with every 
one; and it would appear that in later years he forgot 
not only this confession, but equally the mood which 
prompted it. With the passage of time he markedly 
changed, not as to the substance of his thought, but as to 
the mood which accompanied it. As he turned from 
poetry to criticism, and began through this work to win 
unmistakable public recognition, his sense of oppression 
gave way to one of genial satisfaction. The tangled forest 
was after all not so bad a place, and he thought he saw, 
if not a new path leading on from where the old one 
stopped, at least a means of effecting a clearing in its 
midst. As I have said, he grew in strength and confidence. 
And in 1869 he wrote to his mother: ‘‘My poems repre- 
sent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the 
last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably 
have their day as people become conscious to themselves 
of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the 
literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly 
urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, 
and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Brown- 
ing; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the 
two than either of them, and have more regularly applied 
that fusion to the main line of modern development, I 
am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had 
theirs.’’? This passage has more than once been quoted, 


4 Unpublished Letters, p. 18. 
5 Letters, II, 10. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 167 


and its substantial truth is, I imagine, becoming more 
evident with each year that passes. My, object, however, 
is not to discuss that question, but to show at once Ar- 
nold’s changed mood and, nevertheless, his sense of the 
continuity of his thought between his earlier years and 
the period when he lectured on Heine at Oxford and pub- 
lished the lecture in his Essays in Criticism. 

Clearly he was by that time, at any rate, fully con- 
scious of the nature of his work and of where he stood. 
He stood on the ‘‘profound, imperturbable naturalism’’ 
of Goethe. A lengthy parallel might be drawn out be- 
tween Arnold and Goethe, and it would have many ele- 
ments of interest, but not the least interesting thing 
about it would be the point where it would have to stop. 
Arnold, for instance, wrote an essay on Spinoza. He re- 
garded that philosopher with sympathy and admiration; 
he even went so far as to say that Spinoza and his work 
‘deserve to become, in the history of modern philosophy, 
the central point of interest.’? He regarded Spinoza’s 
attitude of ‘cheerful stoicism’ as closely akin to his own, 
and he found much in his T'ractatus Theologico-Politicus 
which he converted to his own uses in his writings on 
religion, but beyond that he did not go. He confined his 
appreciation to particular points of treatment or of 
thought and to the personal character of the philosopher ; 
he did not go on to confess himself a disciple, a deter- 
ministic pantheist, as did Goethe. And in general Arnold 
fought shy of committing himself to large positive views. 
That this was in part a futile effort, as such efforts must 
be, is true; but, nevertheless, it marks a distinct cleavage 
between the two men. What Arnold did accept unre- 
servedly from Goethe was his subversive and dissolving 
individualism, his assertion that man must live from 
within outwards, his refusal to trust anything on the 
score of its external recommendations. , 


168 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


This was a method rather than a conclusion, though it 
of course implied certain definite conclusions, and it was 
naturalistic because it refused to admit the possibility of 
anything beyond the regular ‘course of nature.’ It ac- 
cepted only that which was within the range of normal 
human experience and which could, accordingly, be fully 
tested and verified by one’s self. Arnold found his great 
illustration of this method in the work of Sainte-Beuve. 
In an obituary notice of the French critic, published in 
the Academy in the fall of 1869, he praised him as a born 
naturalist, ‘‘carrying into letters, so often the mere do- 
main of rhetoric and futile amusement, the ideas and 
methods of scientific natural inquiry. . . . Man, as he is, 
and as his history and the productions of his spirit show 
him, was the object of his study and interest; he strove 
to find the real data with which, in dealing with man and 
his affairs, we have to do.’’* Sainte-Beuve’s long series 
of literary portraits, then, were to Arnold an example of 
the true method of gathering the data on which alone 
trustworthy generalizations about man, his nature and 
his destiny, could be made. 

This was not the method of dogmatic religion, and 
Arnold’s acceptance of it sufficiently explains his aban- 
donment of traditional Christianity. To receive it meant 
acquiescence in external authority, belief in an infallible 
echureh or in an infallible book, and .he could believe in 
neither without denial of his naturalistic principles. 

Protestants of an earlier day, exercising honestly the 
‘right and duty of private judgement,’ had been able to 
subdue their understandings to the Bible because it con- 
tained what they thought adequate evidence for its super- 
natural character. The evidence lay in those prophecies 
in the Old Testament of the coming of the Messiah which 


6 This short notice is reprinted in Essays in Criticism, Third Series (Bos- 
ton, 1910), and in the Oxford edition of Essays by Arnold. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 169 


were held to have been fulfilled in Jesus in such a man- 
ner as to prove their supernatural origin; it lay in those 
prophecies and also in the miracles recorded in connexion 
with the life of Jesus, and elsewhere, in the Bible. But for 
Arnold the force of both kinds of evidence had vanished 
away. Supernatural prophecy and miracles were quite 
outside the bounds of contemporary experience, and 
hence there was a strong presumption that they were out- 
side the bounds of all human experience. At any rate 
overwhelming testimony was needed to establish their 
eredibility—and such testimony there was not. Critically 
examined, Arnold held, the prophecies of the Old Testa- 
ment proved to be very different from what men had once 
supposed; they supported, in fact, no supernatural 
claims whatever. All that could be truly said was that, 
‘‘to a delicate and penetrating criticism, it has long been 
manifest that the chief literal fulfilment by Jesus Christ 
of things said by the prophets was the fulfilment such 
as would naturally be given by one who nourished his 
spirit on the prophets, and on living and acting their 
words.’”’ 

It was the same with miracles. Men have always been 
extraordinarily prone to seek for them as a confirmation 
of what they believe, but in our own day, Arnold con- 
cluded, it is the ‘Time-Spirit’ itself which has under- 
mined the old proof from this source. It does not much 
matter whether one attacks or defends miracles ;—the 
modern mind, with its increased experience, is simply 
turning away from them. It is doing so because, as its 
experience widens, it sees how they come about. It sees 
that in certain circumstances miracles always do arise, 
and that they have no more solidity in one case than in 


7 Literature and Dogma, p. 103. I quote from the most recent reprint 
published by Macmillan, New York. 


170 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


another. Under the stress of appropriate circumstances, 
wherever men exist there is, as Shakespeare says, 


No natural exhalation in the sky, 

No scape of nature, no distempered day, 

No common wind, no customed event, 

But they will pluck away his natural cause, 
And call them meteors, prodigies, and signs, 
Abortives, presages, and tongues of heaven. 


‘‘Tmposture is so far from being the general rule in these 
eases, that it is the rare exception. Signs and wonders 
men’s minds will have, and they create them honestly and 
naturally ; yet not so but that we can see how they create 
them.’”* 

This, of course, was simply to say that the real objec- 
tion to miracles is that they do not occur. Whenever a 
miracle is reported which can be investigated it turns out 
that actually it was no such thing; and the modern mind 
thence concludes, whenever a miracle is reported which 
cannot be investigated, that actually it also was no such 
thing. In the presence of this overwhelming and univer- 
sally-felt probability against miracles Arnold thought 
that formal argument for them could not be taken seri- 
ously and that similar argument against them was super- 
fluous. 

There had been, however, in the seventeenth century 
and later, a third method of proving Christianity true— 
the proof from so-called internal evidence. It consisted 
of the rational demonstration of metaphysical proposi- 
tions concerning the being and nature of God and con- 
cerning his relation to man and the world. By this method 
Christian belief was shown to be completely agreeable 
with the conclusions of human reason and so an inner 
correspondency was established between the Bible and 


8 Literature and Dogma, pp. 116-117. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 171 


the nature of things. The method was conclusive, of 
course, only if the metaphysics were sound and impreg- 
nable. Arnold rejected them with scornful ridicule. He 
was himself no abstract thinker, and he had neither liking 
nor respect for those who were. He apparently never 
tired of poking fun at logicians and metaphysicians, 
though at times he tires his readers. He appears to have 
considered metaphysical thought a gratuitous vanity, an 
exhibition of their talents by men who were proud of 
their dialectical skill and who had no serious employment 
to absorb their energies. It is true, however, that, despite 
his incapacity to understand his foe and despite his taste- 
less blunders, the position he took was not merely the 
result of a temperamental reaction, as might be sup- 
posed from the form of his attack. For the substance of 
his attitude, underneath his cavalier manner, was that 
required by his naturalism. By it he was bound to confine 
knowledge within the sphere amenable to the methods of 
science. He was bound not to go beyond strict induction 
from exact observation and experiment. He was bound 
to reject all pretensions to transcend the limits of nor- 
mal, verifiable human experience. This he consistently 
did; and many to-day, if not most, would regard sympa- 
thetically his attacks on the metaphysician’s pretension 
to attain absolute knowledge, had he been content to stop 
with that. But he was not, for he supposed it possible 
and desirable to banish metaphysics completely from the 
ken of man. This would be unbelievable were it not that 
many men of science and other naturalistic thinkers of 
his age took the same position, and that Arnold shared 
almost all of their prepossessions. The result, of course, 
was simply that an unconscious and largely unexamined 
metaphysie was substituted for a conscious one, which 
was an advantage from no point of view save, perhaps, 
that of journalistic controversy. 


172 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Thus it was that Arnold rejected traditional Chris- 
tianity because he considered its supernatural claims 
hollow and its metaphysical supports rotten. But the 
naturalism which took him this far was on its face, as I 
have said, a method rather than a conclusion. It was 
primarily an instrument of criticism, or so he came to 
conceive it as he meditated the needs of England in the 
light of the ugliness and unintelligence and confusion of 
standards which he saw around him and in the light of 
the poverty of integrating ideas which he found within 
him. He remained, however, as anxious as in his earlier 
days ‘to see life steadily and to see it whole,’ which 
meant, practically, to see it in terms of some absolute 
conclusion. Hence he was no more able to rest honestly 
and contentedly in sceptical negations than are other 
men, perhaps all other men worthy of the name. Truth 
might be far away and veiled, but he could not suppose 
her inaccessible and invisible. Her figure was to be dis- 
cerned, if one only went the right way about it. So he 
wrote in the Preface to the second edition of Essays m 
Criticism: ‘To try and approach truth on one side after 
another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing 
forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will— 
it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to 
gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we 
shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in 
outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously 
towards her on his own, one, favourite, particular line, 
is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of 
the black robe in which she is wrapped.’’ 

What were the elements of the situation he faced? 
Goethe’s subversive, dissolving naturalism, as has been 
seen, he accepted unreservedly. Yet, whether he ever 
fully realized it or not, the fact was that the ugliness, the 
unintelligence, the intellectual confusion which he saw 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 173 


around him were largely the products of essentially the 
same modern spirit. The exercise of the ‘right and duty 
of private judgement,’ as it worked practically with men 
as they are in contact with the historical framework of 
society, produced exactly that ‘dissidence of dissent’ for 
whose spirit and workings Arnold felt undying contempt 
and abhorrence. And as this dissolving spirit of indi- 
vidualism worked in religion, so precisely it worked in 
other fields, sanctioning everywhere the business of 
‘doing as one likes,’ raising everywhere an immense, 
impenetrable wave of self-satisfaction. Arnold pro- 
foundly deplored the religious, intellectual, and esthetic 
anarehy which it had produced, and the political anarchy 
which he feared it was beginning to produce in his own 
day, with freedom ever more and more exalted as an end 
in itself and the swmmum bonum of English life. He fully 
accepted the dissolving spirit of naturalism, then, but 
found its consequences intolerable. Hence his problem 
was really one of discovering, if he could, some method 
of avoiding those consequences, not by abandoning, but 
by merely giving a new direction to, their cause. 

Such a method he thought he discerned in the natural- 
istic criticism of Sainte-Beuve. That was the method of 
knowledge, and knowledge, or science, was the key to life. 
‘‘T am convinced,’’ he wrote to Mrs. Forster, ‘‘that as 
Science, in the widest sense of the word, meaning a true 
knowledge of things as the basis of our operations, be- 
comes, as it does become, more of a power in the world, 
the weight of the nations and men who have carried the 
intellectual life farthest will be more and more felt; in- 
deed, I see signs of this already. That England may run 
well in this race is my deepest desire; and to stimulate 
her and to make her feel how many clogs she wears, and 
how much she has to do in order to run in it as her genius 


174 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


gives her the power to run, is the object of all I do.’” 
Sainte-Beuve’s criticism was the application of the 
method of science to human life, enabling men to see 
human nature as in itself it really is. This meant, of 
course, that it really enabled the individual to know his 
own nature as it was, in an absolute sense, as is implied 
in those subversive questions, ‘But is it really so?—is it 
so to me?’ The final truth, only in outline, but, still, suffi- 
cient for the purposes of life, was thus discoverable by 
each individual for himself if he took the right way of 
unlocking the dark and close recesses of his inward being. 
But truth !—truth was one, indivisible, universal, always 
and everywhere the same. If once each man knew the 
truth of his human nature, then would men be even as 
gods, perfect in thought and deed, and anarchy of all 
kinds would be for ever impossible. All men would be as 
one, and perfect, in taste and thought and action; for all 
men would implicitly obey the authority of right reason, 
felt from within, ‘whose prescriptions are absolute, un- 
changing, of universal validity.” 

So Arnold reasoned, and thought his Essays im Criti- 
cism an illustration of his discovery. He was struck, he 
wrote to his mother, on looking through that book by the 
admirable riches of human nature brought to light 
through his treatment of a small number of writers, 
and by the sort of unity the book had to stimulate the 
better humanity in us.“ That is exactly what he had in 
mind. Human nature he apparently took to be an abso- 
lute entity of some mysterious kind, alike in all and, 
so to say, divine, but hidden away variously within 
men, there to await their discovery of it, partial or 

9 Letters, I, 285-286, 

10 Hssays (Oxford ed.), p. 15. (The Function of Criticism at the Present 


Time.) 
11 Letters, I, 286-287. 





MATTHEW ARNOLD 175 


complete, as occasion might permit. His name, both for 
the process of this discovery and for its transcendent 
results, was culture—a word familiar to all nowadays, 
thanks largely to Arnold’s use of it and to his remarkable 
success in impressing it upon the mind of a whole genera- 
tion. He defined it many times and in many connexions, 
with the tempered but unexhausted fervour of one who 
was not only its first apostle but, humanly speaking, its 
embodiment. In the Preface to Culture and Anarchy we 
are told that it is ‘‘a pursuit of our total perfection by 
means of getting to know, on all the matters which most 
concern us, the best which has been thought and said in 
the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream 
of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and 
habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, 
vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them 
staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following 
them mechanically.’’ 

Culture, then, is the study of perfection. Arnold held 
that study to be synonymous with the effort to see things 
as they really are, for he also defined culture as the 
attempt to learn ‘‘the true, firm, intelligible law of 
things.’’ This also is the attempt of the exact sciences, 
and so far culture and science are one and the same. It 
is the same instinct or ‘power’ in human nature which 
brings both into being, and they are separable only when 
we come to the study of human nature itself. Arnold was 
never entirely clear about this distinction, probably be- 
cause he always tended to take it for granted as obvious, 
but in his praise of the Greeks he says that they pursued 
sweetness and light, beauty as well as truth, and he lays 
it down as a mark of their sound insight that they per- 
ceived that ‘‘the truth of things must be at the same time 
beauty.’’ Again, in speaking of Greek art he says that it 
was a fruit of the scientist’s effort to see things as they 


176 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


really are, ‘‘inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on 
fidelity to nature—the best nature—and on a delicate 
discrimination of what this best nature is.’’ 

These statements indicate his position as a humanist 
more clearly, perhaps, than the distinction he draws out 
and illustrates in his essay on Literature and Science. In 
this essay he complains that those who wish to give 
science the chief place in education leave out of their 
calculations the constitution of human nature. The 
‘powers’ which go to the building up of human life are, 
on a rough analysis, those of conduct, of intellect and 
knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners. 
These are not separate entities, for human nature is uni- 
tary, and consequently we are continually impelled to 
relate, for example, ‘‘pieces of knowledge to our sense 
for conduct, to our sense for beauty.’’ But in this science 
cannot help us; it gives us knowledge, and that is all it 
gives us; whereas literature touches our emotions and so 
gives us knowledge humanized, related to our sense for 
conduct, our sense for beauty, and our sense for social 
life and manners. 

Here Arnold is evidently driving at the same point 
which he suggests in Culture and Anarchy when he 
speaks of sweetness and light in union with each other. 
It can be defined most clearly by an answer to the ques- 
tion whether the scientist can be said to study perfection, 
the complete union of truth and beauty and goodness. 
Obviously he cannot. His concern is with what Huxley 
called the ‘customs of matter,’ and his sole effort is to see 
them as they really are. This is the attempt, however 
chimerical it may be, of the psychologist and the sociolo- 


gist as well as of the physicist, the chemist, and the biolo- \ 


sist. Beauty and goodness are terms of evaluation, and 
with the world of values the sciences have nothing to do; 
—they know not of its existence. The scientist does not 


a eee 





MATTHEW ARNOLD 177 


judge phenomena, or regard them emotionally, as either 
beautiful or ugly, as either good or evil. As a scientist 
he accepts phenomena impartially, endeavouring simply / 
to see them as they are. But Arnold, approaching humat 
nature in the*same empirical spirit, saw that esthetic 
and moral evaluations, which in turn imply standards, 
are fundamental in it, and he concluded that we cannot 
get to know human nature as it really is unless we try to 
learn not merely what we are, but what we may be and 
ought to be. Hence culture demands that we should get 
to know what is distinctive in the thoughts and perform- 
ances of the best and greatest human beings, and get 
not only to know this but to love it, for which the study 
of literature and art is a necessity. Thus we may learn 
to be faithful to nature—the best nature—and we may 
learn how to discern with delicacy and TO EHO what 
this best nature is. 

Culture, being the study of our total perfection, is 
therefore not content with the partial or fragmentary 
view of reality which can alone ever be afforded by the 
sciences. It includes science, but goes beyond it to include 
much more which to science is not significant. Culture, in 
fact, includes everything. It is the due nourishment and 
development of all sides of human nature, not separately, 
but as these exist in us, organically related so as har- 
moniously to form one unitary being. Moreover, in pro- 
portion as we are cultured we realize the extent to which 
our lives are conditioned by the lives of those around us, 
and come to see that we cannot effectively pursue our 
own perfection in isolation or in an indifferent environ- 
ment. As social beings we must not merely seek perfec- 
tion but seek also to make it prevail, so that culture of 
necessity aims at general or social betterment. Culture 
stands or falls with the progress of society towards per- 


178 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


fection, with our faith in human progress, and with our 
desire to labour for this end. 

Culture issues in an inward condition of the mind and 
character which insures one’s taking the one right atti- 
tude, whatever it be, towards all that one encounters in 
one’s passage through life. It is the disclosure of that 
mysterious essence of human nature at its best which 
Arnold saw darkly hidden within each human being. Only 
when this is duly revealed can one be said to possess 
one’s soul; but then, also, one is possessed by right 
reason, a principle of absolute authority which is always 
and everywhere the same. Furthermore, it is not for 
nothing that Arnold speaks of our ‘instinct’ for knowl- 
edge, our ‘instinct’ for conduct, and the like, because with 
him ‘right reason’ is oddly synonymous with perfection 
of taste. And when culture frees us from the tyranny of 
ideas and actions which are customary, not rational, it 
sets up in their place a principle of perfected taste. When 
he is called upon to make a judgement or to decide upon 
a course of action, the cultured man simply allows his 
consciousness to play freely and spontaneously and dis- 
interestedly upon the subject, with inevitably and abso- 
lutely right results. The free, spontaneous play of his 
consciousness brings him out instinctively on the side of 
the angels.” 

Religion, Arnold says, aims at perfection as culture 
does, but it concerns itself with only one element in our 
nature and neglects or even contemns the rest. Religion, 
in its essence and when divested of alien accretions, is 
merely the attempt to conquer ‘‘the obvious faults of our 
animality.’’ Obsessed with the importance of this aim, 
it extravagantly and incorrectly tells us that with these ~ 
faults conquered all other things will be added unto us; 


12 See particularly the concluding pages of the chapter entitled Our 
LTiberal Practitioners in Culture and Anarchy. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 179 


it tells us that this effort is the one thing necessary for 
our salvation. But for this there is no ‘one thing need- 
ful.’ Our problem is not so simple. No one exclusive line 
of action or of effort can thus be enthroned supernally 
without disturbing the harmony of our nature, warping it 
from its true course towards total perfection into an ugly, 
fanatical one-sidedness which is itself an evil, and which 
makes impossible our success even in this our one, 
chosen, exclusive line of advance. ‘The man who knows 
only his Bible cannot know even that.’ And religion, 
which may be defined as ‘‘morality touched with emo- 
tion,’’ takes up only one of the ‘instincts’ or ‘powers’ 
which compose human nature, our ‘instinct’ for conduct, 
and tries to work with it alone. Conduct, of course, is of 
high importance, for it makes up three-fourths of life, 
and religion has hitherto acted effectively in this sphere 
on a large scale, so that culture, aiming to see all things 
justly, grants gladly the weighty place of religion in life. 
But when religion claims supremacy, the friend of cul- 
ture cannot grant this, for culture goes beyond religion 
in its aim at our total perfection. It substitutes for reli- - 
gion’s fanatical advocacy of a one-sided development its 
larger aim after ‘‘a harmonious expansion of all the 
powers which make the beauty and worth of human 
nature.”’ 

Arnold agreed that one could not attach too high an 
importance to morality, but rejoined that one could cer- 
tainly attach too exclusive an importance to it and that 
Christianity, more particularly what he called Puritan- 
ism, did so. So far as it did perform its proper office of 
aiding us to conquer ‘‘the obvious faults of our animal- 
ity,’’ it was worthy of allegiance and support, but only 
as, if one may so term it, a single department included 
within the larger activity of culture. Arnold felt that the 
dissenting Protestantism of England offered convincing 


180 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


evidence of the harm done by religion when it over- 
reached itself in its exclusive claims and its hollow pre- 
tensions to supernatural sanction. It thus captured the 
whole-hearted allegiance of many people, only to tell 
them that all they needed to do in order to fulfil their 
best and highest selves was to be good, to overcome ‘the 
obvious faults of their animality.’ And so they were led 
to undervalue, or even to despise, beauty and knowledge; 
and thence issued, not only the ugliness of their chapels 
and services, but the ugliness, the deformity, the illiberal- 
ity, the stupid self-satisfaction and contented ignorance 
of their lives. But this grievous moral plague could be 
done away by bringing religion down to its legitimate, 
subordinate place within the sphere of culture. 

Soon after Arnold published Culture and Anarchy, 
however, he saw looming up in England a danger oppo- 
site in kind to that which it had been written to meet. 
Culture and Anarchy was a vivacious sermon upon the 
harm done by too much religion, but about 1870 he began 
to have it forced upon his attention that there was a 
growing section of the British public for which religion 
itself was becoming impossible. Science and its implica- 
tions had begun really to take hold of the popular mind. 
The opposition between science and the Bible, between 
science and traditional Christianity, had begun to be 
widely aired. Scientists like Huxley and W. K. Clifford, 
and militant atheists like Charles Bradlaugh, had begun 
to achieve popular success in their attacks upon Chris- 
tianity and the churches. And Arnold now heard of num- 
bers of men who, learning that the Bible was a merely 
human product like any other book or collection of books, 
learning, moreover, that it contained mistakes, doubtful 
legends, and fairy tales in place of what they had been 
taught to regard as supernatural proof of its truth, were 
proceeding to abandon the Bible and its religion alto- 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 181 


gether. These men concluded that, since the Bible con- 
tained much that was not true or that was not what they 
had been taught to believe, there was nothing in it of any 
significance for them, and they concluded that their 
teacher—the Church—was an impostor or a cheat. 

In this, Arnold felt, they concluded wrongly. He sym- 
pathized with them, in that he considered the theologians 
and churchmen to blame for persisting in an absurdly 
wrong-headed interpretation and support of Christianity. 
But, nevertheless, he felt that they were running into an 
extreme which was fully as vicious on one side as was 
English Puritanism on the other, and accordingly he 
proceeded to set forth the ‘simple and natural’ truth of 
the whole matter in Interature and Dogma. All Christian 
bodies were agreed as to the importance of the religion 
of the Bible; they differed from each other in their inter- 
pretation of it; and while they were busily engaged in 
acrimonious conflicts amongst themselves over this ques- 
tion, the thing itself, the religion of the Bible, was sinking 
into neglect. Arnold came forward in his book as the 
devoted friend of true religion seeking to rescue it from 
its apparent friends but real enemies, the theologians. 
He felt the appearance of inconsistency between his ex- 
hortations in Culture and Anarchy and those in Intera- 
ture and Dogma, but in fact, as he insisted, there was 
between the two books no genuine inconsistency. He 
wrote them for different publics, and with objects accord- 
ingly different, but that was all. In the latter he wrote 
as the friend of true religion, and agreed that too high 
an importance could not be claimed for it; but, still, he 
wrote as the friend only of religion as he had already 
defined it. 

We are told that the Bible is to be regarded as a piece 
of literature, or rather as a collection of the literature of 
the Hebrew people, and that it is mistakenly read if read 


182 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


as anything else. Its language is ‘‘fluid, passing, and 
literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific.’’ Its value lies in 
the fact that the ancient Hebrews apprehended the im- 
portance of morality, if not more clearly, at least more 
passionately than any other people, and succeeded in 
getting fully into written words their impassioned sense 
of the worth of the conduct. Hence the Bible is the great 
classic of the world’s literature bearing upon this im- 
portant side of human nature. But its high position does 
not make it different in kind from any other literature. 
It needs, as fully as the literature of any other age or 
people remote from our own, to be interpreted to us, and 
this interpretation is a matter of great delicacy and diff- 
culty. It is a work which taxes the ripest culture to its 
fullest capacity, and which cannot be undertaken without 
disaster by any one not possessed of the ripest culture. 
But when the Bible is interpreted by the cultured critic 
of literature who is alone capable of the task, then we 
begin to see it truly, and we see that it has more to tell 
us about the fulfilment of our nature on its moral side 
than any other book or any other literature. 

We discover that the Bible has its basis, not in any 
unverifiable assumption of a ‘‘Great Personal First 
Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the Uni- 
verse,’’? but in truths of human nature which we can 
verify in our own experience. God’s existence is not a 
mere assumption, or guess, or hope; it is something we 
know as genuinely as we know anything; but what we 
know is simply that God is ‘‘the stream of tendency by 
which all things fulfil the law of their being.’’ This defi- 
nition is inadequate for purposes of edification, yet it 
has the inestimable advantage of being a verifiable fact, 
so that it puts God on ‘‘a real experimental basis.’’ It 
does not go perilously beyond our actual evidence, and 
so does not involve us in pretences which, when they are 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 183 


questioned, we are unable to make good. Moreover, since 
the law of our being with which religion is concerned is 
_ the law of righteousness, we may fitly term God for reli- 
gious purposes the ‘Eternal Not Ourselves which makes 
for righteousness.’ 

What is the fact about righteousness? The fact, verifi- 
able through experience, is that when we do what we 
ought to do and leave undone what we ought not to do we 
have a sense of succeeding in life, of going right, of hit- 
ting the mark, which brings with it a feeling of peace that 
is life’s highest satisfaction. The Hebrews had this ‘‘near 
and lively experimental sense’’ of the beneficence of 
morality which engendered in them the impassioned de- 
votion to it recorded in the Old Testament. The Old Tes- 
tament is thus calculated to rouse us to the importance 
of morality. The New Testament fulfils the Old in the 
sense that it tells us, as the Old does not succeed in doing 
satisfactorily, how to be righteous. The Old-Testament 
Jews in the long run tended to lose their intuition of the 
importance of righteousness because they sought to em- 
body it in definite rules of external conduct and then 
lapsed into the mere mechanical fulfilment of the letter 
of their law: 

But in the New Testament we are told how Jesus re- 
stored the original intuition of the Eternal Not Ourselves 
by transforming the idea of righteousness, making it to 
consist fundamentally of an inward state of the heart and 
feelings. ‘‘To do this, he brought a method, and he 
brought a secret.’’ He ‘‘made his followers first look 
within and examine themselves; he made them feel that 
they had a best and real self as opposed to their ordinary 
and apparent one, and that their happiness depended on 
saving this best self from being overborne. To find his 
own soul, his true and permanent self, became set up in 
man’s view as his chief concern, as the secret of happi- 


184 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ness.’’ This was the method of Jesus, and it consisted in 
that ‘‘change of the inner man’’ which we call repent- 
ance, or conviction of sin. 

‘‘But for this world of busy inward movement created 
by the method of Jesus, a rule of action was wanted; and 
this rule was found in his secret.’’ It was simply self- 
renouncement. ‘‘He that loveth his life shall lose it, and 
he that hateth his life in this world shall keep 1t unto 
life eternal. Whosoever will come after me, let him re- 
nounce himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow 
me.’’ ‘‘Thus after putting him by his method in the way 
to find what doing righteousness was, by his secret Jesus 
put the disciple in the way of dowmg it. For the breaking 
the sway of what is commonly called one’s self, ceasing 
our concern with it and leaving it to perish, is not, Jesus 
said, being thwarted or crossed, but living. And the proof 
of this is that it has the characters of life in the highest 
degree—the sense of going right, hitting the mark, suc- 
ceeding. That is, it has the character of happimess; and 
happiness is, for Israel, the same thing as having the 
Eternal with us, seeing the salvation of God.’’ We are, 
moreover, told, on the authority of quotations from Aris- 
totle, Horace, Goethe, Plato, Wordsworth, and, of course, 
Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man, that actual human 
experience has always and everywhere proved that self- 
renouncement is the road to man’s true happiness. 

No statement, however, of what Jesus brought can be 
complete which does not include ‘‘that element of mald- 
mess and sweetness’? in which his method and secret 
worked. Hence Arnold, after a discussion of this quality, 
concludes with the assertion that ‘‘the conjunction of the 
three in Jesus—the method of inwardness, and the secret 
of self-renouncement, working in and through this ele- 
ment of mildness—produced the total impression of his 
‘epieikeia,’ or sweet reasonableness. ’’ 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 185 


This, then, is true religion, verifiable through experi- 
ence, placed on a ‘‘real experimental basis’’—the reli- 
gion of the Bible, as discriminated by a just and delicate 
criticism. All things exist in the fulfilment of law. For 
conscious beings this is happiness. But man’s nature is 
dual, and his fulfilment of the law of his being depends 
upon intelligent effort. Man has to recognize his lower 
nature as sinful and to renounce it in favour of his true 
self, and this brings him a pure happiness secure against 
all the chances of time and circumstance. This is the 
moral law; to apprehend it through the emotions so as 
to act it out consistently day after day is religion—the 
realization or fulfilment of our nature on the side of 
conduct. The importance of the Bible is that it states the 
moral law clearly, in passionate language, and in con- 
crete, literary form, through symbol and myth, so that it 
brings its contribution of truth to us in a humanized 
shape which comes home to us and stimulates in us the 
intense conviction necessary to rouse us to action. 

Interature and Dogma is, evidently, an essay in criti- 
cism, and one which Arnold wrote under peculiar handi- 
caps. For he already had, when he began, a definition of 
religion which all religious people, whatever their dif- 
ferences amongst themselves, would unite to repudiate. 
He was under the necessity of forcing the language of 
the Bible into agreement with this definition—a necessity 
which he could only meet by much fanciful and perverse 
interpretation, by the deliberate repudiation of some por- 
tions of the book, and by the total neglect of other por- 
tions. He had, furthermore, because of his naturalism, to 
pretend that virtue can be measured in terms of present 
earthly happiness enjoyed by each individual—a pretence 
which, in turn, got him into inextricable difficulties con- 
cerning self-renouncement and the Eternal Law which is 
not ourselves. Nor did he, despite all the difficulties he 


186 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


~ encountered and the sacrifices he made to that end, suc- 
ceed in inventing a religion which avoided all metaphysic; 
for his Eternal Not Ourselves remains a metaphysical 
entity just as certainly whether it be called a law or 
whether it be called a person, the ‘‘moral and intelligent 
Governor of the Universe.”’ 

But, whether a successful one or not, Literature and 
Dogma is, as I say, an essay in criticism, an effort to 
capture the Bible for literature, an effort to make secure 
its place as a literary classic full of great poetry in the 
broad Aristotelian sense of the word. It is a part of 
culture’s search for the best that has been thought and 
said in the world, and a part of culture’s effort to make 
that best prevail. Hence it is not this newly invented 
religion of his, but culture, which is to be taken as Ar- 
nold’s substitute for traditional Christianity. Within his 
scheme of culture, what he understood by religion occu- 
pied a legitimate, even a necessary, but still a subordi- 
nate place, and Literature and Dogma is not the record 
of any change in his general attitude. It does, of course, 
indicate a shift in his thought, which occurred for reasons 
already mentioned. The ‘relaxing and dissolving’ influ- 
ence which he had sought to exert was in fact being 
exerted by forces far more powerful and subversive than 
any he could bring to bear upon English society, and with 
results different from those for which he wished; and 
Interature and Dogma is a memorial of his perception 
of that fact. He exclaimed in a letter written in 1868, ‘‘If 
we can but dissolve what is bad without dissolving what 
is good!’’ That suspicion of a fear, within the short space 
of a couple of years, .grew into the conviction that if 
religion of any kind was to be more than a memory in 
the future it must be at once rescued from its tottering 
guardians and transformed into ‘‘morality touched with 
emotion.’ 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 187 


Nevertheless, though he felt uneasy, he was not on the 
whole displeased with what he saw taking place. In 1881 
he wrote to an acquaintance in France that the force 
which was shaping the future was not with any of the 
orthodox religions, nor with any of the neo-religious de- 
velopments which were proposing to themselves to super- 
sede them. ‘‘ Both the one and the other give to what they 
eall religion, and to religious ideas and discussions, too 
large and absorbing a place in human life; man feels 
himself to be a more various and richly-endowed animal 
than the old religious theory of human life allowed, and 
he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long sup- 
pressed and still imperfectly-understood instincts of 
this varied nature. . . . I think it is, like all inevitable 
revolutions, a salutary one, but it greatly requires watch- 
ing and guiding. The growing desire, throughout the 
community, for amusement and pleasure; the wonderful 
relaxation, in the middle class, of the old strictness as to 
theatres, dancing, and such things, are features which 
alarm many people; but they have their good side. They 
belong to this revolution of which I speak. The awaken- 
ing demand for beauty . . . is another sign of the revolu- 
tion, and a clearly favourable sign of it... . The moral 
is that whoever treats religion . . . as absorbing, is not 
in vital sympathy with the movement of men’s minds at 
present. . . . The great centre-current of our time is a 
lay current.’’'® 

In this letter the friend of cat: speaks out frankly 
enough; and in his essay on The Study of Poetry, written 
a little earlier, he sums up in an eloquent passage his 
enduring position, and at the same time implicitly indi- 
cates the real bearing of Literature and Dogma as an 
essay in criticism. ‘‘The future of poetry is immense, 


13 Letters, II, 220-221. 


188 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high des- 
tinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer 
and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, 
not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be ques- 
tionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten 
to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the 
fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to 
the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry 
the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of 
divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; 
the idea zs the fact. The strongest part of our religion 
to-day is its unconscious poetry. . . . More and more 
mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to 
interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without 
poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of 
what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will 
be replaced by poetry. . . . Wordsworth finely and truly 
calls poetry ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’: 
our religion, parading evidences such as those on which 
the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming 
itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and 
infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams 
and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when 
we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, 
for having taken them seriously; and the more we per- 
ceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize ‘the breath 
and finer spirit of knowledge’ offered to us by poetry.’’ 
What Arnold had to propose, then, as a substitute for 
traditional Christianity was culture. He speaks for it, 
most men have agreed, surpassingly well. He was, Dis- 
raeli told him in 1881, ‘‘the only living Englishman who 
had become a classic in his own lifetime.’’* And this 
flattering verdict has been echoed and amplified by others 


14 Letters, II, 219. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 189 


of weightier judgement. Yet it remains true that this 
_ interpretation of life, summed up in the word culture, 
still raises, as it did in the minds of serious men when its 
proponent was living, many questions which Arnold does 
not answer. And in fact it is something which, it must be 
said, seems to us clearer and more definite and more 
plausible than it really is. Consequently Arnold’s man- 
ner of exposition, so full of charm, so persuasive, so 
strengthened by its echoes of those great voices from the 
past which daily spoke to him, his ease and urbanity, his 
combined lightness and sureness of touch, his freedom 
from all pretentiousness and pedantry, his obvious good 
faith and earnest conviction always burning brightly 
under the surface of his playfulness—all of these quali- 
ties, which are the qualities of his greatness as a man of 
letters and master of effective criticism, still in the end 
serve us badly when we are carried by them to the point 
of conversion, and then begin seriously to ask ourselves, 
what prospect is actually opened up before us, what way 
of life and what goal of endeavour? For we inevitably 
discover that these engaging qualities have really acted 
upon us as a blind, concealing much that is vague or con- 
fused and much that is fanciful—fanciful in the sense of 
being unreal, because unrelated to our actual problems 
and the possibilities actually open to us. 

Frederic Harrison accused Arnold of lacking ‘‘a phi- 
losophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and 
derivative principles.’’? For this Arnold poured ridicule 
upon Harrison, quoting the accusation more than once 
in order to confess, with mock humility, that it was just. 
The language used was absurd enough, and no one will 
wish the ridicule away, yet other contemporaries of more 
solid parts felt objections substantially similar to the 
one adumbrated by Harrison which could not be set aside 
so lightly. Arnold’s friend J. C. Shairp was one, and to 


190 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


him no direct reply was ever made. Henry Sidgwick was 
another. Arnold termed him, with a slight hint of irrita- 
tion, ‘‘an acute though somewhat rigid critic,’’ but did 
little else to turn the point of his attack. Yet his criticism 
was thoroughly damaging.” He asserted that Arnold 
treated ‘‘of the most profound and difficult problems of 
individual and social life with an airy dogmatism that 
ignores their depth and difficulty,’’ and he added that 
although Arnold was dogmatic he was nevertheless 
vague, because when he used indefinite terms he did not 
attempt to limit them, but instead availed himself of 
their indefiniteness. Sidgwick went on to point out that 
the root of culture has always been, ethically, a refined 
eudemonism. It has been a primarily self-regarding atti- 
tude in which thought and feeling have been cultivated 
because of an exquisite pleasure experienced in refined 
states of reflexion and emotion. It has encouraged refine- 
ment of taste, but it has also encouraged the exclusive- 
ness, the moral indifferency, the dilettantism, and the 
general smugness of the connoisseur. It has been and 1s, 
in short, a ‘fair-weather theory of life,’ which could not 
conceivably arise save in a time of exceptional pros- 
perity, and even then only amongst a few individuals 
amply sheltered from the normal experiences of life— 
its chances, difficulties, conflicts, and tragic sufferings. 
And in fact Arnold himself confessed this, or the greater 
part of this, and it was not culture as it actually is, but 
a culture idealized, transformed, purified of its smugness 
and levity and imbued with a devout energy and fire 
borrowed from religion, that he advocated. But, Sidg- 
wick complained, Arnold talked sometimes of this ideal 

15 Jt is contained in the essay entitled The Prophet of Culture in his 
Essays and Miscellaneous Addresses. J. C. Shairp’s criticism is to be found 


in his Culture and Religion, a series of lectures first published in 1870 and 
reprinted a number of times in immediately following years. 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 191 


culture, sometimes of actual culture, without being able 
to distinguish them, not knowing of what he spoke. And 
Arnold illustrated in his attitude towards all but a trifling 
minority of his fellow-countrymen, and in his attitude 
towards many current questions, not the ideal culture of 
his dreams and wishes, but the workings of actual cul- 
ture. He was himself, in fine, the best proof one could 
want of the impossibility of effecting the transformation 
of culture for which he wished, and which he saw to be 
necessary if it was to be adequate to the needs of life. 
That Sidgwick’s criticism could not be gainsaid Arnold 
signalized in admitting its acuteness. As for the charge 
of rigidity with which he qualified his admission, it is 
elear enough that what he referred to was simply a 
rigour of analysis which, though modest, offered a 
marked contrast to his own ‘sinuous, easy, unpolemical’ 
manner. It is equally clear, too, that this was the direct 
cause of whatever acuteness Sidgwick’s remarks pos- 
sessed. Arnold would have done well to emulate it. His 
refusal to do so made him violate his own counsels in yet 
another serious way which Sidgwick might appropriately 
have noticed had he so chosen. For it was one of Arnold’s 
pronounced convictions that his countrymen had a perni- 
cious love of action for its own sake which constantly led 
them into all manner of mistakes, and it was to be one of 
the benefits of culture that it would lead men to act, in- 
deed, more effectively than ever before, but not to act 
hastily or blindly, and not to act at all until they had 
examined their ideas and aims and, by a just and pains- 
taking criticism, had sifted them and clarified them and 
made sure that they not only had a worthy source but 
were intrinsically right. He exhorted them, in the words 
of his idolized Bishop Wilson, not to exhibit a blind and 
undiscriminating zeal for making reason and the will of 
God prevail, but first to make sure that their light was 


192 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


not darkness. Yet he himself never stopped long enough 
in his advocacy of culture to determine clearly what it 
was that he preached, and not only failed to distinguish 
between its actual and its ideal character, but also be- 
tween its personal and social aspects, between knowledge 
and taste in his scheme, and between culture as a means 
and as an end. Into this confusion, moreover, this radical 
defect of the critical intelligence, he was led by the work- 
ines of culture as it actually is, for he was led thither by 
his exclusive, confident reliance upon the oracle of his 
own individual taste. Because he fancied that the final 
rectification of all things was to issue from the instinc- 
tive preferences of perfected taste, he tended to regard 
his own instinctive preferences as final and irreproach- 
able so soon as he became conscious of them, and forth- 
with he pressed them upon the public, without stopping 
to make certain that his light was not darkness. 

It may be said, however, that, despite all vagueness 
and inconsistencies, Arnold’s aim was, plainly enough, 
the spiritual perfection of humanity, of which perfection 
he tried to take a comprehensive view. And this is true, 
and the aim was essentially religious. I have quoted Mr. 
S. P. Sherman’s assertion that Arnold was ‘‘innately 
and profoundly religious,’’ and this has indeed, particu- 
larly since the publication of selections from his note- 
books in 1902, become a commonplace of critical opinion, 
but the bearings of the fact have not equally been recog- 
nized. Arnold’s ideal of spiritual perfection he derived 
from religion, which is to say, from traditional Chris- 
tianity. It would not otherwise, moreover, have appeared 
before him as a living reality, almost tangible, warm and 
colourful enough to be worth fighting for at any risk and 
hardship—able, in short, to inspire the most tremendous 
actions. Nor could it so have remained for him a real and 
vital force had he not continued throughout his life to 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 193 


nourish his vision on the works of the great Christian 
writers. Yet the source from which this ideal came to him 
he was constrained by his naturalism to repudiate, and 
so, if he was to keep it at all, he had to attempt to trans- 
fer it, will he nill he, to some naturalistic theory of life. 

It was a thing easier to talk about than to do. Any 
naturalistic theory of life which legitimately includes 
aims or purposes must have in view some earthly ideal. 
It need not be materialistic or sensuous, but it does have 
to be, by the nature of the case, an ideal realized or realiz- 
able through normal human experience. Perfection of 
any sort can only be made a naturalistic ideal by project- 
ing it into the indefinite future of the race and resting it 
upon belief in human progress. Even then it is impos- 
sible to conceive in what sense the word can be used of 
beings who, howsoever developed into a fuller and richer 
and less fallible humanity, would still be the temporary 
creatures of change living amidst storms and earth- 
quakes, upon a planet doomed to become uninhabitable 
and perhaps itself to perish. But, supposing this crucial 
difficulty somehow surmounted, perfection can still be an 
ideal only for the race, not for individuals, whose lives 
can have only an instrumental value as means to a prob- 
lematic end not their own and, for all practical purposes, 
infinitely distant. Belief in human progress—a different 
thing from evolution—has no sort of genuine foundation 
in history, science, or reason. It is, as Sidgwick said of 
culture, a ‘fair-weather theory of life,’ the product of a 
remarkable epoch of material expansion and spiritual 
decadence, and already, after a brief period of efflores- 
cence, it has visibly begun to decay. But Arnold wrote 
when it was at its optimistic height, subscribed to it him- 
self, and regarded culture as the chosen instrument of 
further racial progress. Hence at times he wrote as if he 
were attempting only to build for the future, the indefi- 


194 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


nite future, of the race, to which cloudy mirage individ- 
uals were to sacrifice themselves. This was to be an 
apostle of the ‘religion of humanity’; yet Frederic Har- 
rison never converted him to positivism, and usually he 
did not mean to advocate in culture anything so obviously 
fanciful and unreal. 

Usually he wrote for living individuals and proposed 
to them something which he asserted to have significance, 
not simply for their problematic, infinitely remote de- 
scendants, but actually for themselves. And then he 
defined perfection in a special sense and limited it to the 
individual’s spiritual life, assuming, one supposes, this 
to be so far separable from the individual’s body and his 
strictly physical activities and likewise from his environ- 
ment with the chances and hardships that issue from it. 
Within these limits he defined perfection as a certain 
inward state of being which—judging from what he says 
in Literature and Dogma—gives one the sense of going 
right, of succeeding, of hitting the mark. It is perhaps 
significant that he only succeeded in getting thus far 
with a definition when his subject-matter forced him to 
try to translate into naturalistic terms the Christian plan 
of salvation, and it is unfortunate that he then involved 
himself in the apparent paradox that self-realization 
cannot be achieved save through self-renouncement. The 
paradox is, however, only apparent, as he makes it clear 
that, as his naturalism demands, what he really means 
to signify by the traditional term is our resignation of 
our lower selves in favour of our higher selves. How on a 
naturalistic basis he is able to distinguish absolutely be- 
tween these two selves is a question he does not answer, 
and we may for the moment leave it unasked. What we 
are told is that we have to resign our vulgar tastes in 
order to enjoy refined pleasures, our love of make-believe 
in order to achieve the truth, our contentment with ugli- 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 195 


ness in order to dwell with absolute beauty, and our 
hankerings for selfish advantage in order to be wholly 
just. And the reason is that nothing short of this will 
reward us with an enduring and unmixed feeling of self- 
satisfaction. Other satisfactions prove to be delusions or 
snares; they flee our approach or wither in our mouths. 
Perhaps they do, but one wonders how Arnold can lay 
it down as a fact. He has himself told us, as has been 
seen, that man lives from within outwards, and that each 
one has to make these discoveries for himself and abide 
by the result steadfastly against all authorities, even 
against Bishop Wilson if need be. ‘Is it really so?—is it 
so to me?’ 

But, supposing that one makes the ‘right’ discoveries 
and does attempt to renounce one’s ‘lower’ self, can one 
succeed? Christians, of course, have always denied it, 
have asserted that no efforts of our own can be sufficient 
to overcome our lower selves, inherently sinful as we are, 
and must be, while clothed in fleshly bodies; and they 
have placed perfection in a non-natural, eternal, un- 
changing world of the spirit which they tell us we may 
gain only with the help of divine grace, and even with 
this help not while we remain earthly creatures. But Ar- 
nold, necessarily, could have nothing to do with this non- 
natural world beyond the possibility of human experi- 
ence, nor yet was he willing to commit himself to the 
extraordinary paradox that the fulfilment of life can 
come only through complete devotion to a mere figment 
of the imagination, an impalpable creation of the fancy 
which has no real existence anywhere. Hence he was 
forced to insist that absolute justice and beauty and 
truth can be realized, actually are realized, within the 
limits of earthly life. 

Is it so? The whole weight of human experience is 
unitedly and unequivocally against the notion. This 


196 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


world has never yet been the scene of justice, and has not 
come appreciably nearer that goal within the span of 
history. This world is not the scene in which is or can be 
realized any of that company of immaterial values, con- 
sciousness of which and all possible devotion to which 
make up the distinctively human character of life. Nor is 
this a new discovery. Job’s comforters have become a 
byword amongst us, even though we are always forget- 
ting why the words of Bildad the Shuhite and his com- 
panions were displeasing to the Lord. Job, as we all 
know, was a man altogether righteous, so that the noise 
of his goodness re-echoed even to the precincts of the 
Almighty, and yet Job was afflicted with all that is evil 
in the sight of men, and not the least of his afflictions was 
the presence of friends who were sure that he was being 
punished for sins he would not confess. Elihu, Bildad, 
and the rest were, in other words, of that company who 
are sure that righteousness is rewarded, that justice is 
realized upon earth—and they were wrong. And all who 
believe with them are wrong and, for anything that we 
can see, must always be wrong. Their number, of course, 
is large, for probably most of us, if we courageously 
scrutinize our instinctive Judgements, find that there is 
a certain glamour attaching to worldly success which 
almost forces our respect, while we feel a suspicion 
amounting to practical certainty that there must be some- 
thing wrong with the man who fails to acquire wealth or 
position, or who is bent by loss or affliction. Yet generally, 
unless we have the misfortune to be salesmen or efficiency 
experts, we recognize these instinctive judgements as a 
weakness and banish them from our serious thoughts. 
And, indeed, nothing can be more certain to the reflec- 
tive and informed mind than that injustice and wrong 
rule the affairs of this world, where in every generation 
and in every community the wicked, the cunning, the un- 


MATTHEW ARNOLD 197 


scrupulous, and the dishonest men flourish, while wise 
men are neglected or starved and good men are con- 
temned or scorned. 

This is a truism, and Arnold was not one in his sober 
moments to be ignorant of it, but he could not help him- 
self. Yet its consequences are plainly disastrous to his 
gospel of perfectionism. On the terms he offered not a 
single effective step can be taken towards the spiritual 
perfection which was his ideal. For if one proposes 
earthly satisfaction to men as an end they will seek it 
where they can find it, whether or not it be enduring and 
unmixed. And in no case, moreover, can one dictate the 
terms in which such an end is to be conceived, since self- 
realization or satisfaction is subjective, and men will 
seek it where according to their own lights it is to be 
found. Culture may, indeed, refine men’s tastes, and 
cause them to demand that the wine of their delight shall 
have a ruddier glow, but it will not transform their 
tastes, while it will bring in return for its gifts its own 
peculiar vices. Culture as we know it is just that—the 
education of taste; and, if one may so put it, culture can- 
not be radically transformed into something else without 
becoming something else. 

It is of course not therefore to be despised, but it is 
the fact that Arnold himself would have been the first 
to recognize the failure of his attempt to construct a 
naturalistic theory of life, had he not believed that some- 
how he could manage to preserve as its keystone or crown 
a seale of values which came to him from traditional 
Christianity. 


wae 
SAMUEL BUTLER 


‘‘MELCHISEDEC was a really happy man. He was without 
father, without mother, and without descent. He was an 
incarnate bachelor. He was a born orphan.’’ So wrote 
Samuel Butler, admiringly, for he too was an incarnate 
bachelor, though this does not mean quite all that the 
innocent, or the fanatically logical, might suppose. What 
it does mean can be pieced together pretty completely 
from his autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, 
from his Notebooks, and from the two fat volumes of the 
memoir written by the naive, garrulous, devoted Mr. H. 
Festing Jones. Briefly and in general terms it means that 
Butler was not so much a responsible sharer and co- 
worker in the affairs of life as a detached onlooker, 
pleased to enjoy himself in his own way, unconcerned 
amidst the fever and toil of those caught in the wheels 
of circumstance, free to ask embarrassing questions, to 
utter troublesome remarks and, if he liked, to make faces 
at the world. He was not forced to obey the rules of 
the games he played by any obvious or immediately-felt 
external compulsion, and he had none within him. Fet- 
tered by no respect for authority, he light-heartedly ven- 
tured to play one game after another, sure that what he 
called his common sense was a sufficient guide, and con- 
tent, if he could not do more, at least to have his fun with 
men of graver and more solid character whom he could 
not understand and did not care to understand. He con- 
tentedly said: ‘‘I am the enfant terrible of literature and 


SAMUEL BUTLER 199 


science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary 
and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I 
know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.’’ 

He was right, and for his pains he was once described 
as the ‘‘Galileo of Mares’-Nests.’’ The phrase is happy 
enough, as far as it goes, but it requires not only amplify- 
ing, but qualification, in order to a just understanding 
of Butler’s position. His career was a series of escapades, 
of which probably the queerest was the one which occa- 
sioned the descriptive phrase just quoted. This was his 
theory that the writer of the Odyssey was a woman. Not 
only was he convinced that he had sufficient evidence to 
establish this, but also to show where she had lived and 
to identify much of the natural scenery which she must 
have had in mind in writing the poem. He even gave her a 
name, insisting that she was Nausicaa, though about this 
he was not seriously concerned as he was about the rest. 
What is one to think of this?—what of the competent 
Grecian who spends much time in carefully working out 
such a theory, visiting the localities he discusses and 
attempting to settle his problem with scientific thorough- 
ness? The Authoress of the Odyssey, as the book is 
called, has of course been dismissed by scholars as an 
instance of misplaced ingenuity, and one who knew noth- 
ing else of its writer would inevitably set him down as a 
mere eccentric. Moreover, Butler’s contemporaries, with 
more or less excuse in different cases, similarly dismissed 
most of his other books as they appeared, so that, as far 
as he was generally known at all while still living, he was 
regarded as a mere eccentric. 

Yet this was quite wrong. Butler himself asserted that 
he never made his books, but that they grew. They came 
to him and pressed themselves on him with more force 
than he could resist, insisting on being written and on 
being such and such. Most eccentrics, I suppose, could 


200 . CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


say as much for their performances, but Butler also 
wrote in one of his notebooks, following a list he had 
made of his ‘mares’-nests’: ‘‘I am not going to argue 
here that they are all, as L do not doubt, sound; what I 
want to say is that they are every one of them things 
that lay on the surface and open to any one else just as 
much as to me. Not one of them required any profundity 
of thought or extensive research; they only required that 
he who approached the various subjects with which they 
have to do should keep his eyes open and try to put him- 
self in the position of the various people whom they 
involve. Above all, it was necessary to approach them 
without any preconceived theory and to be ready to 
throw over any conclusion the moment the evidence 
pointed against it. The reason why I have discarded so 
few theories that I have put forward—and at this 
moment I cannot recollect one from which there has been 
any serious attempt to dislodge me—is because I never 
allowed myself to form a theory at all till I found myself 
driven on to it whether I would or no. As long as it was 
possible to resist I resisted, and only yielded when I 
could not think that an intelligent jury under capable 
guidance would go with me if I resisted longer.”’ 

This has the appearance of candour, and though there 
is probably a concealed implication in the earlier portion 
of the passage, it may as a whole be taken for what it 
seems to be. And what Butler tells us is that, looking 
merely at common things accessible to all, he continually 
found questions arising in him concerning their received 
interpretation. He was ready to entertain any questions 
that came, yet he never formulated and published a new 
answer to them until it was forced on him, so powerfully 
as to make it seem in the end self-evident. He was, in 
other words, a man of keen, restless, searching mind, who 
was willing, without preconceptions, in genuinely empiri- 


SAMUEL BUTLER 201 


cal fashion, to contemplate any possibility. He had no 
axe to grind. He was not anxious to make the facts mean 
one thing rather than another. He simply wanted to see 
what they did mean, and to that end was ready to face 
impartially in any direction, and was determined not to 
commit himself until the evidence by its own weight 
forced a conclusion. 

This is something very different from eccentricity, or 
the love of novelty for its own sake, though in all ages 
men have been unable or slow to distinguish between the 
two amongst their contemporaries. And in Butler’s case 
the difficulty was aggravated by several circumstances. 
His entirely open-minded attitude, as it has just been 
described, is identical with that which the modern scien- 
tist professes to have, and Butler in fact entered as freely 
into what was thought to be the domain of science as he 
entered into the realms of literature and art and religion. 
Yet he himself was not, and never pretended to be, a 
scientist, nor did he attempt to force his manner of writ- 
ing into conformity with current and respectable practice 
when he was dealing with scientific problems. Moreover, 
he had early in his career, in the only one of his books 
which became widely known during his lifetime, Hre- 
whon, advertised himself as a whimsical observer of 
society, with an imagination playful but not untinged by 
malice, who remained to scoff, more or less irresponsibly, 
albeit with gleams of common sense, where others had 
come to pray. Who was he, then, this literary upstart, 
this dilettante, to challenge Darwin concerning evolution, 
as he began to do in Life and Habit and did do more 
directly in Evolution, Old and New? The fact that he did 
not question evolution itself, nor Darwin’s accuracy of 
observation, or the like, was scarcely a mitigation of his 
offence. He only questioned, as a thinker, Darwin’s inter- 


202 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


pretation of his data, his hypothesis of natural selection, 
and, as an historian, Darwin’s treatment of his prede- 
cessors; but, still, he did question Darwin, and that was 
enough. It was as if he had set out wantonly to disfigure 
a great national monument. 

He was greeted only with contempt and, as he might 
have put it, with very little even of that. For the most 
part he was simply ignored, but he was thus rebuked by 
the Saturday Review: ‘‘When a writer who has not given 
as many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given 
years, is not content to air his own crude though clever 
fallacies, but assumes to criticize Mr. Darwin with the 
superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a 
boy’s theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously 
than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think 
that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer 
of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator who takes 
all his facts at second-hand.’’ 

With the issue thus raised Butler would make no com- 
promise, and in this certainly he was right. He correctly 
saw a danger to society and a violation of the professed 
spirit of science in an attitude towards Darwin which 
Huxley and others were doing their best to encourage. 
He wrote in a notebook: ‘‘Science is being daily more and 
more personified and anthropomorphized into a god. By 
and by they will say that science took our nature upon 
him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Dar- 
win, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe 
in him, eéc.; and they will burn people for saying that 
science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance 
of our own ignorance.’’ No one can soberly deny that this 
danger has existed and still exists, though one may hope 
that a developing and fully justified popular distrust of 
the ‘expert’ will keep things from soon going as far as 


SAMUEL BUTLER 203 


Butler feared. On the other hand, Butler’s rejoinder to 
his reviewer was hardly calculated to help either him or 
his cause. In Unconscious Memory he quoted the above 
passage from the Saturday Review and proceeded to 
comment on it in this manner: ‘‘The lady or gentleman 
who writes in such a strain as this should not be too hard 
upon others whom she or he may consider to write like 
schoolmasters. It is true I have travelled—not much, but 
still as much as many others, and have endeavoured to 
keep my eyes open to the facts before me; but I cannot 
think that I made any reference to my travels in Evolu- 
tion, Old and New. I did not quite see what that had to do 
with the matter. A man may get to know a good deal 
without ever going beyond the four-mile radius from 
Charing Cross. Much less did I imply that Mr. Darwin 
was pert: pert is one of the last words that can be applied 
to Mr. Darwin. Nor, again, had I blamed him for taking 
his facts at second-hand; no one is to be blamed for this, 
provided he takes well-established facts and acknowl- 
edges his sources. Mr. Darwin has generally gone to good 
sources. The ground of complaint against him is that he 
muddied the water after he had drawn it, and tacitly 
claimed to be the rightful owner of the spring, on the 
score of the damage he had effected.’’ 

This is a pert rejoinder, and it is unfortunately charac- 
teristic of Butler’s manner. It illustrates, too, the school- 
boyish perversity which was strong in him and which 
some of his friends were so foolish as to encourage. He, 
in fact, had a very simple trick which, perpetually re- 
peated, served to start all manner of game, and often did 
duty with him for candid open-mindedness. He delighted 
to turn commonly accepted statements upside down and 
to startle conventional minds with these inverted propo- 
sitions. ‘‘An Honest God’s the noblest work of Man.’’ 
Frequently he went no further than this, but at times he 


204 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


was able to do more with his cheaply-won originality. An 
example is the sonnet which he entitled A Prayer: 


Searcher of souls, you who in heaven abide, 

To whom the secrets of all hearts are open, 

Though I do lie to all the world beside, 

From me to thee no falsehood shall be spoken. 

Cleanse me not, Lord, I say, from secret sin 

But from those faults which he who runs can see, 

Tis these that torture me, O Lord, begin 

With these and let the hidden vices be; 

If you must cleanse these too, at any rate 

Deal with the seen sins first, ’tis only reason, 

They being so gross, to let the others wait 

The leisure of some more convenient season ; 
And cleanse not all even then, leave me a few, 
I would not be—not quite—so pure as you. 


Since Butler’s mind was acute, it is not surprising that 
in the course of years his simple trick at times served him 
well, so that he turned up a number of really important 
and fruitful propositions; but neither is it surprising 
that these were not immediately assessed at their true 
worth, nor that he also turned up a deal of ingenious 
nonsense. He could thus fairly claim that all of his 
‘mares’-nests’ lay on the surface and did not require for 
their discovery ‘‘any profundity of thought or extensive 
research,’’ although he meant, perhaps, a little more than 
his words at first sight convey. Furthermore, he honestly, 
though not always successfully, tried to distinguish his 
sense from his nonsense, and the theses which he de- 
fended at length and publicly were sincere convictions, 
forced upon him after he had tried carefully and impar- 
tially to test them. In this matter it is always necessary 
to distinguish between his convictions and his manner of 
expressing and defending them, as he constantly tended, 


SAMUEL BUTLER 205 


even when he was at heart most serious, to give free rein 
in his method of presentation to his perversity, to his 
whimsical fancy, and to his vein of malice. In this he was 
singularly obtuse. Aiming to arrest public attention, he 
so little understood men and was guilty of such gross 
faults of taste as to create the impression, in the few who 
did read his books on their first appearance, that he was 
a mere mountebank, unscrupulously catching at any 
notion, howsoever absurd or subversive, in a desperate 
effort to gain notoriety. The impression was incorrect, 
and yet not wholly so, for Butler’s motives were probably 
always more or less mixed. 

Detached from society, bent on enjoying himself in his 
own way, the consistent foe of accepted opinion, heav- 
ing bricks at the big-wigs, contemptuously rejected or 
ignored by his contemporaries, Butler was nevertheless 
a true child of his age and has, besides, taken his place 
as a not unimportant figure in the history of ideas. Hence 
his work rewards study, as an outline of the development 
of his thought will make clear. 

The son of an Anglican clergyman and the grandson of 
a bishop, Butler was expected, after he had received his 
degree at Cambridge, to take holy orders, and he went 
from Cambridge to London in 1858 to prepare for ordina- 
tion by doing parish work amongst the poor. It was not 
at Cambridge, but while he was engaged in this work, 
that he was apparently first awakened to any doubts 
about Christianity and aroused to try to think for him- 
self. His trouble came upon him in a sufficiently odd way. 
He was led by an accident to the discovery that several 
boys in his parish had never been baptized, yet he could 
not see that their lives and characters differed in any 
way from the lives and characters of others who had been 
reeularly baptized. But what then became of the doctrine 
of baptismal regeneration? He anxiously extended his 


206 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


inquiries until he was able to compare larger groups of 
baptized and unbaptized youths, with the result, of 
course, that his initial doubt was confirmed. He then ap- 
proached his ecclesiastical superiors with his evidence, 
only to find that they were unable or unwilling to advance 
any considerations tending to establish the efficacy of 
infant baptism—to find, indeed, that they simply re- 
garded his questioning attitude as in itself reprehensible, 
if not sinful. 

Butler’s doubts, however, once SEN were not thus 
to be stilled, and he presently refused to take holy orders. 
The trouble over infant baptism, one may be sure, was 
only the gateway, opened to let in other questions. Leslie 
Stephen has remarked concerning his own abandonment 
of Christianity : ‘‘I did not feel that the solid ground was 
giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being 
relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering 
that my creed was false, but that I had never really 
believed it. I had unconsciously imbibed the current 
phraseology; but the formulas belonged to the superficial — 
stratum of my thought instead of to the fundamental 
convictions.’’* Butler has not said as much, but things 
must have been pretty well the same with him. The whole 
course of his life shows that he was not the man to take 
truth for granted, once his mind was awakened, and 
shows also that Christian doctrine had never at any time 
attained any real hold upon him. 

In addition, it is known that about this time, or cer- 
tainly not much later, he began to concern himself over 
the difficulty or impossibility of harmonizing the accounts 
of the Resurrection contained in the four Gospels. He 
was led, in fact, to an independent study of the New 
Testament, and it would appear that as soon as he had 


1 Some Early Impressions, p. 70. 


SAMUEL BUTLER 207 


fairly entered on this he began to feel increasingly the 
weight of all the naturalistic objections to the super- 
naturalism of Christianity. How rapidly he discovered 
all that he had never really believed is not definitely 
known. It cannot be inferred from the dates of his pub- 
lications bearing on Christianity, as he was in New Zea- 
land engaged in sheep-farming from 1859 until 1864, and 
as his time was fully occupied for several years there- 
after in the study of painting. It is, of course, not a 
matter of the greatest importance, but it seems probable 
that his abandonment of Christianity was almost as 
prompt as it was complete. 

He attacked the problem of belief by inquiry into the 
miraculous elements in the life of Jesus, and of these he 
came to regard as crucial the event to which his attention 
had first been called, the Resurrection. If this had oc- 
curred all of the rest was possible, and acceptance of 
Christianity followed as a matter of course. As soon as 
he began to look for it, however, he found that anything 
even approaching what would to-day be called proof was 
not to be had, but that, on the contrary, the earliest 
extant reports of the event were in irreconcilable opposi- 
tion to each other. This in itself, aside from other con- 
siderations increasing the probabilities against the Res- 
urrection, was enough to decide his question, because 
obviously such an event demanded, for honest belief, the 
clearest and most overwhelming kind of proof. 

He saw, however, that even though he might be cer- 
tainly correct in rejecting the Resurrection, there was 
still an historical problem connected with it which de- 
manded explanation. For it seemed to him just as clear 
as that the Resurrection had not taken place, that both 
the immediate disciples of Jesus, and Paul, were con- 
vineed that it had actually occurred, and that around this 
one supposed certainty had grown up the whole miracu- 


208 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


lous legend of the life and ministry of Jesus.’ Butler 
found, as he became acquainted with the Biblical scholar- 
ship of his day, that Straus endeavoured to clear up this 
difficulty on a naturalistic basis by supposing that the 
disciples suffered an hallucination or a series of halluci- 
nations. But he thought this a hopelessly strained and in- 
deed impossible solution. In casting about for one better 
suited to the probabilities he was led to conjecture that 
Jesus had not actually died on the cross, and had later 
recovered sufficiently from his injuries to appear several 
times before his disciples, who, of course, in that age 
would not have doubted that he was truly risen from the 
dead. 

Butler elaborated this theory first in an obscurely pub- 
lished pamphlet which appeared in 1865, and then later, 
hoping to attract more attention to it, he incorporated the 
greater part of the pamphlet in The Fair Haven, which 
was published in 1873. It was announced on its title-page 
as ‘‘A work in defence of the miraculous element in our 
Lord’s ministry upon earth, both as against rationalistic 
impugners and certain orthodox defenders, by the late 
John Pickard Owen, with a memoir of the author by Wil- 
liam Bickersteth Owen.’’ In other words, the book was 
an elaborate piece of irony, planned not for deception, 
but rather to attract attention to Butler’s theory. And 
the design and execution were so far successful that the 
book is still readable and still read. The supposed memoir 
of the supposed author, in particular, is a masterpiece 
of ironical portraiture. 

On the book’s first appearance, however, it suffered an 

2In Hrewhon Revisited Butler illustrated his conception of the origin 
and growth of Christianity. The book is disfigured by malicious caricature, 
but is an ingeniously conceived attempt to show how a miraculous legend 


could swiftly grow up, flourish, and exert a vast influence, although based 
entirely on delusion and blunder. 


SAMUEL BUTLER 209 


odd mischance. A number of people were taken in by it; 
not only did several religious newspapers commend it as 
a worthy attempt to defend orthodoxy by meeting op- 
ponents of Christianity as far as possible on their own 
ground, but, besides, some churchmen began recommend- 
ing it to their friends. Canon Ainger, the editor and 
biographer of Lamb, sent a copy to a person whom he 
was attempting to bring back into the fold. Butler had 
not anticipated such a misfortune. Just before the book 
was published he wrote to a friend: ‘‘I dare say I shall 
get into a row—at least I hope I shall.’’ And in another 
letter he said: ‘‘I should hope that attacks on The Fair 
Haven will give me an opportunity of excusing myself, 
and if so I shall endeavour that the excuse may be worse 
than the fault it is intended to excuse.’’ But alas for the 
calculations of the unregenerate infidel!—that he would 
be embraced by the pious he had not dreamed. 

He attempted to save the situation by issuing a new 
edition over his own name, with a preface in which he 
ridiculed those who had been deceived. The ridicule, 
whether kind or not, was deserved; it seems now incon- 
ceivable that any one could ever have opened the book 
without seeing its real character. The ostensible defence 
of Christianity concedes to unbelievers, in the name of 
scrupulous fairness in argument, every point that was 
being actively debated when The Fair Haven was writ- 
ten. The fictitious Owen, moreover, plainly speaks the 
author’s real opinions in many long passages in which, 
under the transparent plea of fairness, he summarizes 
the arguments of opponents of Christianity. And in addi- 
tion, in the memoir by William Bickersteth Owen, Butler 
found opportunity not only for much incidental irony, 
but also for the direct expression of his own views, in 
passages which tell of a period of scepticism and unbe- 
lief through which John Pickard Owen passed before he 


210 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


finally reached the fair haven of a serene belief in a bas- 
tard and inverted Christianity. 

Readers of this memoir are not likely soon to forget 
some of the incidents recounted ;—such as the story of 
the investigations which led the two boys to the discovery 
that a visiting friend of their mother never said her 
prayers at night unless she thought she was being ob- 
served, or as the young John Pickard Owen’s grave 
moral indignation when he found out that women had 
legs, like men, but deceived all the world by enveloping 
themselves in a ‘‘mass of petticoats and clothes.’’ In 
these and other incidents Butler did not lose sight of his 
real purpose, but he achieved a memorable vividness and 
excellently controlled the tone of his narrative so as to 
lend the whole an air of verisimilitude. The disguise wore 
thinner, however, when he began to quote a number of 
fragments supposed to have been written by John Pick- 
ard Owen during his period of scepticism. These frag- 
ments, in fact, as far as they go, so clearly express But- 
ler’s own settled convictions that it is necessary to pause 
over some of them. 

In one fragment the fabled Owen asks himself why 
Christians interpret literally all passages in the New 
Testament about the guilt of unbelief, and insist on the 
historical character of every miraculous legend, while 
they become indignant if any one demands an equally 
literal acceptance of the precepts concerning human con- 
duct. It would be ‘visionary,’ ‘utopian,’ or ‘wholly un- 
practical’ for him that hath two coats actually to give to 
him that hath none. He that is smitten on the one cheek 
is told to hand the offender over to the law, not simply 
to turn the other to the smiter. Again, we are not really 
to be indifferent to the morrow, or to neglect ordinary 
prudence; nor do we pay heed to the Gospel warnings 
against praying in public. Neither can we strictly inter- 


SAMUEL BUTLER 211 


pret any of the parables, except perhaps that of the good 
Samaritan, with advantage to human welfare. The par- 
ables commonly praised are in reality very bad. The tales 
of the Unjust Steward, of the Labourers in the Vineyard, 
of the Prodigal Son, of Dives and Lazarus, of the Sower 
and the Seed, of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, of the 
Marriage Garment, and of the Man who planted a Vine- 
yard ‘‘are all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender 
a very low estimate of the character of God—an estimate 
far below the standard of the best earthly kings; where 
they are not immoral, or do not tend to degrade the char- 
acter of God, they are the merest commonplaces imagi- 
nable, such as one is astonished to see people accept as 
having been first taught by Christ.’’ 

As it is with the parables, Owen thinks, so with the 
Sermon on the Mount—its teaching is commonplace 
where it 1s not immoral. And he concludes that the ad- 
miration freely lavished upon the teachings of Christ is 
identical with that lavished on certain modern writers 
who have made their reputations by telling people what 
they very well knew and were in no danger of forgetting. 

The device of quoting supposed fragments enables 
Butler to return upon himself and to emphasize some of 
his points by repeating them with variations. In a pas- 
sage following the one concerning the Sermon on the 
Mount Owen asks over again his question about the 
literal interpretation of one part of the sayings of Christ 
while other parts, those which inculcate more than the 
ordinary precepts universally accepted as early as the 
time of Solomon or perhaps earlier, are interpreted very 
freely so as not to cause us undue inconvenience. He de- 
cides that we have cut down Christianity so as to make 
it suit our own conventions—we have not altered the lat- 
ter so as to make them harmonize with Christianity. In- 
stead of giving to him that asketh we take care to avoid. 


212 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


him, though if the precept was intended only to encour- 
age liberality it was not needed. The probability is, in 
fact, that we are naturally inclined to be too liberal in 
assisting others; and the more indiscriminate liberality 
we indulge in, the more terrible is the mischief we cause, 
so that this saying of Christ’s, like most of his others, 
only becomes harmless when we consent to give it merely 
lip-service. It is, indeed, ‘‘only conventional Christianity 
which will stand a man in good stead to live by; true 
Christianity will never do so. Men have tried it and found 
it fail; or, rather, its inevitable failure was so obvious 
that no age or country has ever been mad enough to carry 
it out in such a manner as would have satisfied its 
founders. ’’ 

Owen proceeds to quote in his support the passage in 
Swift’s Argument agamst Abolishing Christianity where 
Swift disclaims any attempt to defend real Christianity 
and says he contends only for the restoration of nominal 
Christian belief and observance. To offer at the restoring 
of the former ‘‘would be, indeed, a wild project; it would 
be to dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the 
wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the 
entire frame and constitution of things, to ruin trade, 
extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; 
in short, to turn our courts of exchange and shops into 
deserts.’’ So, Swift concludes, ‘‘every candid reader will 
easily understand my discourse to be intended only in 
defence of nominal Christianity, the other having been 
for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as 
utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth 
and power.’’ | 

Yet it is these schemes of wealth and power, and not 
Christianity, which preserve us from relapsing into bar- 
barianism, which have created and preserved our civiliza- 
tion. ‘‘And what if some unhappy wretch, with a serious 


SAMUEL BUTLER 213 


turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all this 
talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act 
upon it? Into what misery may he not easily fall, and 
with what life-long errors may he not embitter the lives 
of his children!’’ 

In another fragment Owen says that we do not pluck 
out our eyes if they offend us, nor cut off our right hands, 
that we do take heed for the morrow and should be un- 
utterably wicked and foolish did we not, and that in 
general we do those things which human experience has 
taught us to be to our advantage, regardless of any pre- 
cept of Christianity for or against them. Why then do 
we keep pretending that Christianity is our chief guide? 
Perhaps it is to compensate for our refusal to take seri- 
ously the precepts which have to do with conduct that we 
rigidly stand out for the letter of the Divine Word in 
those points which make no demand upon our comfort or 
convenience. Thus we never conventionalize dogma, but 
insist most inflexibly upon its literal interpretation. In 
really practical matters, however, we do say that the 
teaching of Christ is not to be received according to its 
import ;—why then do we continue to give it so much 
importance? ‘‘Teaching by exaggeration is not a satis- 
factory method, nor one worthy of a being higher than 
man; it might have been well once, and in the Hast, but 
it is not well now. It induces more and more of that jar- 
ring and straining of our moral faculties, of which much 
is unavoidable in the existing complex condition of 
affairs, but of which the less the better. At present the 
tug of professed principles in one direction, and of neces- 
sary practice in the other, causes the same sort of wear 
and tear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine 
by continually reversing it when it is going it at full 
speed. No mechanism can stand it.”’ 

These fragments written by Owen, evidently, indicate 


214 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


more than a repudiation of belief in the miraculous ele- 
ments of Christianity. Christian ethics as well are con- 
demned, and Butler’s position is not merely negative, but — 
rests upon an interpretation of life and an ethical sys- 
tem conformed, as one may say, to the ways of this world. 
In Erewhon Butler expresses the same point of view in a 
different manner. His Mr. Higgs, on his first visit to the 
land of nowhere, found two religious systems in vogue. 
There was the ancient respectable religion of the musical 
banks, which every one professed to believe and treated 
with great respect, though no one practiced its precepts, 
and only some of the women even took them at all seri- 
ously. But alongside of Hrewhonian Christianity there 
was another cult, that of the Goddess Ydgrun, which no 
one professed to believe, but whose precepts everybody 
actually followed, or tried very hard to follow. Ydgrun, 
of course, is Mrs. Grundy, and her precepts are those of 
respectability or good form. She tells us to do, as far as 
we can, what our most favoured neighbours do, and to 
believe that being in the social swim—which also implies 
ample financial resources and command of the material 
refinements of life—is the height of blessedness. 

Hrewhon, of course, is not a country where everything 
is as it should be—its analogue is not Utopia but Lilliput 
—yet in this case Butler’s satire is directed against the 
Hrewhonians’ hollow profession of beliefs which have no 
relation to their actual lives, while he describes their 
secret worship of Mrs. Grundy with approval of them 
for so far recognizing things as they are and basing their 
lives on realities. 

Butler, then, condemned Christianity not merely be- 
cause it would ask us—as he somewhere says—to believe 
that the cow Jumped over the moon, but also because he 
thought it clear that the experience of mankind had 
demonstrated the absurdity or harmfulness of all of the 


SAMUEL BUTLER 215 


distinctively Christian precepts directed to the guidance 
of conduct. If the religion was comparatively harmless 
in his own day, it was because men’s actions were, by so 
much, better than their professions. Christian profes- 
sions men still made, but at any rate they no longer tried 
to follow them. Though they remained curiously reluc- 
tant to say so outright, by the manner of their lives they 
showed well enough that they knew what was good for 
them. And it was not the Christian view of life, but one 
closer to reality. 

Butler’s elaboration of the theoretical basis of this 
opposed view, closer to reality, would seem, if the order 
of his publications be taken as the criterion, to have 
come later than his perception of its ethical implications. 
And this is almost certainly the case; but, nevertheless, 
he had definitely committed himself to a kind of natural- 
ism as early as 1861 or 1862 and, though his naturalism 
changed in character with the passage of time, his views 
remained no less naturalistic to the end than they had 
been in the beginning. Darwin’s Origin of Species was 
published at just about the time when Butler was sailing 
for New Zealand. He read the book as soon as he could 
obtain a copy after his arrival, and was at once con- 
verted. Upon his acceptance of the theory of evolution 
he evidently proceeded to reconstruct his mental world 
in accordance with it, and he found it an adequate centre 
for all he knew of the world of men. This, of course, was 
in itself a sufficient change to account for the nature of 
his attack on Christianity, and it settled it once for all 
that henceforth he was to look upon men empirically and 
to define virtue in terms of success and well-being. 

As soon, however, as the first flush of Butler’s enthu- 
siasm for Darwin’s book had passed, he began to look at 
it critically, and he found himself dissatisfied. The earli- 
est hint of his dissatisfaction, perhaps at this time felt 


216 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


rather than fully conscious, but none the less unmistak- 
able, is to be found in a paper called Darwin among the 
Machines, which Butler published in a New Zealand 
newspaper in 1863. He wrote with characteristic whimsi- 
eality. Calling attention to the rapid evolution in recent 
years of mechanical contrivances, in comparison with the 
extreme slowness of organic evolution, he professed to 
be alarmed lest the machines, swiftly gaining on man as 
they were, might soon achieve primacy over him and en- 
slave him for their own purposes, Just as man previously 
had enslaved the dog, the horse, and the other domestic 
animals. 

But this grotesque fancy is baseless, one may say on 
reading it unprepared by acquaintance with Butler’s 
other books, for machines do not have purposes of their 
own as do men. And this was precisely Butler’s point. 
He was already beginning to feel dissatisfied, not with 
the concept of evolution, but with Darwin’s hypothesis 
of natural selection and the survival of the fittest as the 
chief means by which it was brought about. He thus was 
amongst the first, or perhaps was the first, to put his 
finger on that part of Darwin’s work which time has 
shown to be the least satisfactory. No reputable biologist 
of the present day, I believe, finds himself able to accept 
natural selection as Darwin understood it, and some 
biologists of high attainment are apparently of the 
opinion that we are no nearer an exact and verifiable 
knowledge of the method of evolution than men were be- 
fore the publication of the Origin of Species. There has 
been in recent years, moreover, an increasing tendency 
to turn to vitalistic hypotheses in explanation of the 
method of evolution, and all of these go more or less in 
the direction of Butler’s position. What the future will 
bring in this field no one can know—if, indeed, the sub- 
ject by its very nature will not always elude strict scien- 


SAMUEL BUTLER 217 


tific treatment—but time has at any rate already made 
evident the cogency of Butler’s objection to natural 
selection and of his alternative conjecture. 

Butler’s point, then, was simply that men, and all or- 
ganic creatures, do have purposes of their own—their 
own at least for the period of their separate existence— 
whereas machines of whatever degree of complexity do 
not; and Darwin’s way of accounting for evolution would 
account very satisfactorily for the development of ma- 
chines, but made it impossible to regard organic crea- 
tures as purposive beings. In the paper above mentioned, 
concerning the threatened tyranny of the mechanical 
creation, Butler gave Darwin’s position what he con- 
sidered to be a perfectly logical development, if it was 
correct. 

Natural selection, of course, so far as it is accepted as 
the ‘efficient cause’ of evolution, makes development de- 
pend, not upon the creature, but upon its environment. 
It transfers the factors of development from within the 
organism to the external conditions acting upon it..Dar- 
win supposed that, of two organisms existing at the same 
time and almost identical in character, one might be 
better suited to its environment than the other. Accord- 
ingly the former would survive and perpetuate itself, 
while the latter would not. Thus a given type would be- 
come established, not absolutely, but relatively, because 
it is an ultimate fact that no two organisms are ever 
absolutely identical, imperceptible variations spontane- 
ously occurring in the case of each one born. The surviy- 
ing type just referred to, however, would remain rela- 
tively constant until a significant new variation occurred ; 
—that is, one enabling its possessor to adapt himself 
more perfectly to his environment than his friends and 
relatives. And upon this event he, of course, would be- 


218 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


come the survivor and perpetuator of his advantageous 
variation. 

Thus it is that natural selection makes environment the 
determining factor in evolution, the small, constant, 
spontaneous variations in organisms affording endless 
differences out of which the surrounding conditions natu- 
rally ‘select,’ on the basis of adaptation, a few for sur- 
vival. And no trace of purpose or design is to be dis- 
cerned in the process. It is not only, from the human 
point of view, incredibly wasteful and cruel, but also 
wholly blind and objectless. Moreover, the process, im- 
partially comprehending all organic life, of course in- 
cludes ourselves; and for us it specifically means that 
not only is consciousness a mere piece of useless orna- 
mentation, without which our lives would go on precisely 
as they do with it, but also that our purposive view of 
the world and of ourselves is wholly delusory. 

It was this at which Butler balked. It seemed to him 
that such an explanation of the method of evolution was 
puerile in its disregard of evidence which any serious 
hypothesis had to take into account. ‘‘Shall we see some- 
thing,’’ he asked, ‘‘for which, as Professor Mivart has 
well said, ‘to us the word ‘‘mind’’ is the least inadequate 
and misleading symbol,’ as having given to the eagle an 
eyesight which can pierce the sun, but which in the night 
is powerless; while to the owl it has given eyes which 
shun even the full moon, but find a soft brilliancy in dark- 
ness? Or shall we deny that there has been any purpose 
or design in the fashioning of these different kinds of 
eyes, and see nothing to make us believe that any living 
being made the eagle’s eye out of something which was 
not an eye nor anything like one, or that this living being 
implanted this particular eye of all others in the eagle’s 
head, as being most in accordance with the habits of the 
creature, and as therefore most likely to enable it to live 


SAMUEL BUTLER 219 


contentedly and leave plentitude of offspring? And shall 
we then go on to maintain that the eagle’s eye was 
formed little by little by a series of accidental variations, 
each one of which was thrown for, as it were, with dice? 
We shall most of us feel that there must have been a 
little cheating somewhere with these accidental varia- 
tions before the eagle could have become so great a 
winner.’”® 

Butler took his stand in favour of the cheating. He felt 
confident that purpose and design there are in the world, 
and that most of us instinctively believe this because it is 
really so. Moreover, he also considered it inconceivable 
that consciousness should be a meaningless, useless real- 
ity ;—yet a reality it is, and no one denies it. Hence he 
felt confident that any hypothesis worth serious atten- 
tion must take it into account as a significant fact—must 
be so framed as to give consciousness work to do such as 
we believe actually is effected by our minds. Briefly, he 
conceived that phenomena are regulated by an inner 
teleology, by a purpose which they carry within them- 
selves, not by a purpose imposed on them from the out- 
side—as, for instance, by a Creator with an independent 
existence of his own. Every particle of the universe and 
every aggregate of particles from the simplest to the 
most complex, such as ourselves, belongs to one family, 
all being animated more or less obscurely with what is 
essentially one purpose; and this animating principle or 
mind resides within the particles of the universe, being, 
indeed, one inseparable aspect of them, just as ‘matter’ 
is another. ‘‘ We shall never get straight till we leave off 
trying to separate mind and matter. Mind is not a thing 
or, if it be, we know nothing about it; it is a function of 
matter. Matter is not a thing or, if it be, we know nothing 


8 Evolution, Old and New (ed. of 1911), p. 3. 


220 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


about it; it is a function of mind.’’* Ultimately the uni- 
verse consists of a single vibrating substance, which we 
may call mind or matter indifferently, or perhaps prefer- 
ably mind-matter, and the kinds of vibrations going on 
within it at any given time determine whether it will 
appear to us ‘‘as (say) hydrogen, or sodium, or chicken 
doing this, or chicken doing the other.’’ 

Thus the universe makes itself. Taken as a whole, it is 
the only self-subsistent thing we know, and is what the 
theologians call God, in whose life we all live and move 
and have our being. The theologians, however, are wrong 
in taking, as they always have, a grossly inadequate, one- 
sided view of God; for God is the sum of all that is. And 
we are all, from the tiniest, apparently lifeless particle 
of hydrogen or sodium or the like up to the grandly ani- 
mated human being, parts not merely of one family, but 
of one body—the body of God.’ In appearance so diverse, 


4 Notebooks, p. 67. There are further notes on the subject on pp. 74 ff. 
From these the following may be quoted: ‘‘ People say we can conceive the 
existence of matter and the existence of mind. I doubt it. I doubt how far 
we have any definite conception of mind or of matter, pure and simple. 
What is meant by conceiving a thing or understanding it? When we hear of 
a piece of matter instinct with mind, as protoplasm, for example, there 
certainly comes up before our closed eyes an idea, a picture which we 
imagine to bear some resemblance to the thing we are hearing of. But when 
we try to think of matter apart from every attribute of matter (and this 
I suspect comes ultimately to ‘apart from every attribute of mind’) we 
get no image before our closed eyes—we realize nothing to ourselves. Per- 
haps we surreptitiously introduce some little attribute, and then we think 
we have conceived of matter pure and simple, but this I think is as far as 
we can go. The like holds good for mind: we must smuggle in a little 
matter before we get any definite idea at all.’’ 

5In the articles reprinted after Butler’s death under the title God the 
Known and God the Unknown he had limited God to the ‘organic creation,’ 
the conception being otherwise the same as that outlined above, Later, 
however, in Unconscious Memory, he stated that he had not republished 
these articles because he had come to see this limitation as untenable and 
wrong. Thus he ended in a pantheistic naturalism, akin to Goethe’s—though 
there is nothing to show that he was ai all influenced by either Goethe or 
Goethe’s teacher, Spinoza. Two passages from Unconscious Memory sum- 


SAMUEL BUTLER 221 


so discontinuous, so individual, we nevertheless are 
united together in the working out of a vaster purpose 
than we consciously know, even as are the cells which 
form the body of a single organic creature. Our separate- 
ness and our differences are delusions if we take them 
absolutely—they are only appearances, or ‘false shows 
of knowledge,’ in comparison with all that unites us in- 
dissolubly each to each. 

It follows that, as life and mind are omnipresent in the 
universe and are fundamentally one beneath all the 
diverse forms they take, in the realm of organic life off- 
spring and parents are literally identical with each other. 
A child is literally the continuation of its parents’ life, 
a link in a chain, and it is illusory to regard it as having 
any genuine individuality. 

Further, any organism which does not know completely 
how to achieve its purpose is endowed with conscious- 


ming up his final position may be given here (ed. of 1920, pp. 176, 177): 
‘“T would recommend the reader to see every atom in the universe as living 
and able to feel and to remember, but in a humble way. He must have life 
eternal, as well as matter eternal; and the life and the matter must be 
joined together inseparably as body and soul to one another. Thus he will 
see God everywhere, not as those who repeat phrases conventionally, but as 
people who would have their words taken according to their most natural 
and legitimate meaning; and he will feel that the main difference between 
him and many of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereas both 
he and they use the same language, his opponents only half mean what they 
say, while he means it entirely.’’ ‘‘The attempt to get a higher form of 
life from a lower one is in accordance with our observation and experience. 
It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get it from that which 
has absolutely no life is like trying to get something out of nothing... . 
A little leaven will leaven the whole lump, but there must be some leaven. 
. . . We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as living, in respect 
of the qualities it has in common with the organic, rather than the organic 
as non-living in respect of the qualities it has in common with the inorganic. 
True, it would be hard to place one’s self on the same moral platform as a 
stone, but this is not necessary; it is enough that we should feel the stone 
to have a moral platform of its own, though that platform embraces little 
more than a profound respect for the laws of gravitation, chemical affinity, 
etc.’? 


222 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ness—an instrument which enables it to learn. This is the 
essence of consciousness, and it may be defined simply as 
the presence of an unsolved problem of existence. As 
soon as the problem is solved, consciousness begins to 
retreat, while habit supervenes, and then instinct. To 
know that one knows anything is nothing to be proud of; 
it is a certain indication that one knows it only imper- 
fectly. The moment it is known perfectly it is dismissed 
from consciousness. An unconscious instinct is the fruit 
of a successful struggle to solve the problem in question, 
and its operation is the performance of a perfectly memo- 
rized lesson. The instinctive or involuntary acts of ani- 
mals and human beings are the expression of certain 
knowledge—of the only certain knowledge they have; 
they are the expression of what Butler, with the appear- 
ance of paradox, called unconscious memory. The things 
we do we know not why; but because we must, are the 
best things we do, because they rest on the firmest basis 
of genuine knowledge. We are not conscious of it, just 
because we do know it so well, but we remember every- 
thing that we ever really learned in the persons of our 
forefathers—our forefathers who extend through the 
human race, through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, 
and through the realm of the inorganic. Hence, to sum it 
up, the less conscious an organism is—or, more accu- 
rately, any particle of matter—the more perfectly it 
knows what it is about. Animals understand the business 
and the object of living much better than do human 
beings—by as much as their consciousness is less. 
Paradoxical as this view may seem, it still does do 
what the hypothesis of natural selection completely fails 
to do; it does give us a method of evolution which, while 
it does not violate any of the facts which Darwin took 
into account, also provides for consciousness a signifi- 
cant place in the process and one in accordance with our 


SAMUEL BUTLER 223 


own experience of the actual workings of our minds. The 
eagle, then, made its eye, intelligently, knowing what kind 
of eye it needed for its business, just as the musician, 
knowing what he needs for his business, intelligently 
makes his instinctive, though vastly complex, habits of 
performance. So, too, ‘‘a hen is only an egg’s way of 
making another egg.’’* The egg knows perfectly what it 
is about; the hen knows perhaps not quite so clearly, but 
still well enough. Man also knows well enough up to a 
certain point. Man ‘‘begins as the primordial cell—being 
verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on split- 
ting itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experi- 
ence. Put him in the same position as he was in before 
and he will do as he did before. First he will do his tad- 
poles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from long prac- 
tice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows arms and 
legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit, 
till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not 
yet learnt so thoroughly. Some part of it, as the breath- 
ing and oxidization business, he is well up to, inasmuch 
as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and 
hair, the upright. position, the power of speech, though 
all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble—for he is 
very stupid—a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his 
newer and more complex environment, and this puz- 
zles him—arrests his attention—whereon consciousness 
springs into existence, as a spark from a horse’s hoof.’” 
From this it is a logical enough conclusion that we are 

best attending to our real business in life when we are 
most thoroughly enjoying ourselves. We are then par- 
taking of the essence of life, and the more enjoyment we 
ean secure the better we are. It is, however, not always 

6 Life and Habit, p. 134. 


7 Notebooks, p. 55. Succeeding quotations, unless otherwise accounted 
for, are from the same volume. 


224 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


an easy matter, and so problems press upon us. With 
them comes the possibility of mistake, and this is ‘‘one 
of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If 
oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for 
hydrogen and thus learn not to mistake it any more, we 
should say oxygen was alive. The older life is, the more 
unerring it becomes in respect of things about which it is 
conversant—the more like, in fact, it becomes to such a 
thing as the force of gravity, both as regards unerring- 
ness and unconsciousness. ’’ 

Butler wondered, accordingly, if life was such a force 
as gravity, still in the process of formation. He appar- 
ently concluded that this, or something near this, was 
the truth of the matter, but at the same time recognized 
that we now are so far from the end of our problems 
that we seemingly have an infinite capacity for blunder- 
ing. And wrong decisions are fatal because, in propor- 
tion as they are decisions, we inexorably act upon them 
while life lasts. Consciousness is only an instrument, if, 
indeed, that word does not go too far in its implication, 
since, aS I have said, it may be defined simply as the 
presence in the mind of an unsolved problem. The right 
answer to the problem is enjoyable action or the means 
to such action, but there is nothing in the nature of con- 
sciousness to guide us to this right answer, and we are 
on the whole unlikely to hit upon it until experience has 
convinced us that the other possible answers are wrong. 
But it is of the essence of action to be whole-hearted, and 
hence when we do make a decision we not only act upon 
it inexorably but are convinced that everybody else must 
do so too. Proselytizing and persecution are thus insepar- 
able from life, and appear as vigorously when consider- 
able numbers have gone wrong as when they have gone 
right. 

Butler wrote some fantastic notes on this subject which 


SAMUEL BUTLER 225 


he never published, though he said the same thing more 
soberly in Life and Habit. I quote them because they very 
well illustrate the irresistible temptation he constantly 
felt to express his thought in an exaggerated, whimsical, 
grotesque way. No matter how significant and well-con- 
sidered his thought might be, no matter how seriously he 
regarded it and wanted others to share his view, he could 
never get a firm hold on the decent proprieties of illus- 
tration and expression, but was always wandering off 
into trivialities which—appealing though they appar- 
ently are to many of his present-day admirers—are often 
flagrant violations of taste, or masks which effectually 
obscure, instead of aiding, his real purpose. 

Thus he says that the act of eating is really ‘‘a kind 
of proselytizing—a kind of dogmatizing—a maintaining 
that the eater’s way of looking at things is better than 
the eatee’s. We convert the food, or try to do so, to our 
own way of thinking, and, when it sticks to its own 
opinion and refuses to be converted, we say it disagrees 
with us. An animal that refuses to let another eat it has 
the courage of its convictions and, if it gets eaten, dies a 
martyr to them. So we can only proselytize fresh meat; 
the convictions of putrid meat begin to be too strong for 
us. It is good for a man that he should not be thwarted— 
that he should have his own way as far, and with as little 
difficulty, as possible. Cooking is good because it makes 
matters easier by unsettling the meat’s mind and pre- 
paring it for new ideas. . . . Sitting quiet after eating 
is akin to sitting still during divine service so as not to 
disturb the congregation. We are catechizing and con- 
verting our proselytes, and there should be no row... . 
Sea-sickness or, indeed, any other sickness is the inarticu- 
late expression of the pain we feel on seeing a proselyte 
escape us just as we were on the point of converting it.’’ 
Indigestion ‘‘may be due to the naughtiness of the stiff- 


226 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


necked things that we have eaten, or to the poverty of 
our own arguments; but it may also arise from an at- 
tempt on the part of the stomach to be too damned clever, 
and to depart from precedent inconsiderately. The 
healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative. Few 
radicals have good digestions.’’ ‘‘We cannot get rid of 
persecution; if we feel at all we must persecute some- 
thing; the mere acts of feeding and growing are acts of 
persecution. Our aim should be to persecute nothing but 
such things as are absolutely incapable of resisting us.’’ 

That these observations legitimately spring out of But- 
ler’s serious thought is apparent at a glance; and they 
are amusing—amusing as are the somewhat similar per- 
formances of Mr. Harold Lloyd or other professional 
comedians. There is a place in life for such amusement, 
but not the place that Butler was always tending to give 
it. Yet, in truth, Butler was himself a bundle of incon- 
eruities, and his exaggerated whimsicality is only one 
side of a pronounced individualism which he exhibited 
throughout his life—while he preached a communism 
more complete than any doctrinaire politician has ever 
dreamed of! 

For,.as we see, he arrived at the conviction that the 
universe is really one immense organism with a purpose 
towards which it is driving; that what amongst us passes 
for birth and death is only a process of waste and repair; 
that we are as old as the universe and shall last as long; 
that mind and matter are merely functions of each other ; 
that all differences we observe are differences only of 
degree, our distinctions being useful rather than true; 
that our immortality resides not in our individualities 
but in our bodily cells, or, more exactly, in their constitu- 
ents; and that what we call God is simply the life of the 
whole viewed as one, the sum of the things that are. 

From this pantheistic naturalism Butler made certain 


SAMUEL BUTLER | 227 


practical deductions which form the basis of his ethical 
system, if it can legitimately be called such, and which 
help to give his view-point its distinctive character. In 
human life, as we have seen, what we call man’s natural 
instincts, as far as they go, comprise his surest wisdom, 
since they are the sum of what he certainly knows. If 
instincts sufficed us we should be better off than we are, 
but even in the best people they do not suffice. We are all 
constantly confronted with situations which require some 
conscious decision on our part. What are we to do? By 
all means, Butler says, avoid thinking for yourself if it 
is possible. Do not trust your own unaided consciousness, 
that blundering instrument, if there is any way out of it. 
To think for yourself is a desperate last resort, and in 
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is not necessary. 
There is the still small voice of common sense; there is 
the example of what the best people do, an ever present 
help in time of trouble. Common sense is the accumulated 
practical wisdom of mankind, and it is our surest indica- 
tion of the real values of life and of right courses of 
action. The best people, as Matthew Arnold complained, 
are inaccessible to ideas—but why? Because they do not 
need them; they get along happily as they are. And the 
almost instinctive deference which we give them is as it 
should be. It is really nature’s way of telling us that these 
people are the fine flower of humanity whom we would 
do well to be like as far as in us lies. 

Common sense, then, is our surest guide whenever 
instinct fails us, and the values of life as estimated by 
common sense are its true values. It tells us to beware of 
extremes, to avoid the exceptional in thought and con- 
duct, to seek our own welfare. It tells us that Macaulay 
was right about the acre in Middlesex, that a bird in the 
hand really is worth two in the bush. It tells us to make 
the best of our present lives, trusting that remoter possi- 


228 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


bilities will take care of themselves; and this means that 
we should seek the maximum of enjoyment consistent 
with security and the avoidance of consequent illness. 
The authority of common sense is self-evident; it is, 
as was just said, the stored-up wisdom of an infinite 
multitude, derived from experience. It is thus closer to 
the divine purpose which animates us darkly than can 
be the unaided deliberations of any individual. It may 
occasionally be necessary and right to go counter to 
common sense, but it is almost certain that the individual 
who thinks so is wrong, and that his course of action is 
a blunder. Occasionally it may not be so, but it takes 
extraordinary and overwhelming evidence to prove that 
the voice of common sense is not the voice of God. 
What the gospel of common sense practically comes to 
is seen particularly well in The Way of All Flesh, and 
also in many of the published extracts from Butler’s 
notebooks. In the novel, when Theobald Pontifex marries 
the daughter of a clergyman, Butler turns to the reader 
and asks, with reference to the latter: ‘‘Did you ever have 
an income at best none too large, which died with you all 
except two hundred pounds a year? Did you ever at the 
same time have two sons who must be started in life 
somehow, and five daughters still unmarried for whom 
you would only be too thankful to find husbands—if you 
knew how to find them? If morality is that which, on the 
whole, brings a man peace in his declining years—if, that 
is to say, it is not an utter swindle, can you under these 
circumstances flatter yourself that you have led a moral 
hife?’’ To lead a moral life, then, is to follow a course of 
conduct which brings one a sufficiency of means and a 
mind at peace with itself. ‘‘The true laws of God are the 
laws of our own well-being.’? When George Pontifex, 
Theobald’s father, dies, Butler remarks that since he 
lived to be nearly seventy-three years old and died rich 


SAMUEL BUTLER 229 


he must have been in very fair harmony with his environ- 
ment. What he had done was ‘‘to observe what things do 
bona fide tend to long life and comfort, and to act accord- 
ingly’’—and doing this he did enough. ‘‘ All animals, ex- 
cept man, know that the principal business of life is to 
enjoy it—and they do enjoy it as much as man and other 
circumstances will permit. He has spent his life best who 
has enjoyed it most.’’ Butler concedes that George Pon- 
tifex’s character was not what we call ‘exalted,’ but 
points out that common sense has little or nothing to say 
for people of exalted character. ‘‘Homer tells us about 
some one who made it his business always to excel and 
to stand higher than other people. What an uncompanion- 
able, disagreeable person he must have been! Homer’s 
heroes generally came to a bad end, and I doubt not that 
this gentleman, whoever he was, did so sooner or later.’’ 
A high standard is a luxury, perhaps harmless in the 
very rich, but sinful in the general run of men. It is like 
a hothouse plant—something that cannot hold its own in 
the world. 

Right and duty Butler logically dismisses as unsafe 
guides. ‘‘Pleasure . . . is a safer guide than either right 
or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, 
right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, 
if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry 
a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When 
men burn their fingers through following after pleasure 
they find out their mistake and get to see where they have 
gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them 
through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea 
concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he 
dresses himself in angel’s clothes, can only be detected 
by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt 
this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to 
an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after 


230 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on 
the whole much more trustworthy guide.”’ 

Butler’s effort here, and in his work as a whole, was 
evidently to wse common sense. In the field of conduct he 
saw men professing respect for Christian ethics but act- 
ing for the most part in accordance with very different 
principles directed towards very different ends. And when 
he had convinced himself of the hollowness of Christian- 
ity’s pretensions and had decided that they were based 
on delusion and mistake, it was an easy and ‘sensible’ 
conclusion that men of the world were following a better 
mode of conduct than they knew. He concluded, as he 
tells us in The Fair Haven, that Christian morality was 
‘a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor wear, 
but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and 
blunders.’’ Violently contradicting common sense, at 
every point it set at nought the values of this present 
world for the sake of returns which one could not con- 
vert into cash at any bank, and in so doing it demanded 
a way of life which was a denial of life. That many had 
been willing to die for Christianity proved nothing ;— 
they had got killed, as a matter of fact, precisely because 
they were wrong. They were attempting to act—as intelli- 
gent people now attempt to act—only on the basis of full 
and unmistakable evidence, but we now know that their 
evidence was worthless. Had they been able to know 
what we know they would never have been so foolish as 
to become Christians, and no more should we. Fortu- 
nately, even when Christianity was at its worst, and was 
flourishing mightily, many men refused completely to 
assent to it, and so the race did not perish, and civiliza- 
tion, though scotched, was not killed. 

This is plausible, and could be made more plausible 
than Butler made it, but is it sensible? Christianity is 
to be condemned because it bids men control or crush 


SAMUEL BUTLER 231 


natural propensities for the sake of an end to which 
those propensities do not of themselves lead; whereas in 
truth, according to Butler, men’s natural propensities 
comprise their surest wisdom. But on his own showing 
natural propensities are not enough, never have been 
enough; for consciousness, he says, appears only for a 
significant work, only when organisms are confronted by 
genuine problems which baffle instinct or habit. We may, 
if we like, assent to the paradox that animals have more 
intelligence than men, because they lead a life untroubled 
save by external hindrances to enjoyment, but we can 
only do so by adding that it is the business of leading 
animals’ lives which they so well understand. Ask them 
to lead men’s lives, and you put them up a tree. It is odd, 
then, that Butler should insist upon the significance of 
consciousness, as an indubitable indication that we have 
problems to solve which have never presented themselves 
to animals, only to turn upon himself and say that we 
should use conscious intelligence as little as possible 
because we are likely to come to wrong conclusions— 
conclusions which do not, as he would wish, bid us try to 
sink ourselves to the level of animal life. He begins with 
the ‘sensible’ conviction that it is foolishness to deny 
one’s self pleasure for the sake of an illusory end, finally 
to conclude that pleasure is the only object of existence— 
a conclusion to which only a small number of men has 
ever been ready to subscribe, and so one which certainly 
goes counter fo common sense. Likewise he begins with 
the ‘sensible’ conviction that consciousness has a mean- 
ing and a real place in life, to end by saying that it is a 
horrid burden which we should use simply for the pur- 
pose of ridding ourselves of it as fast as we can. We are 
informed that instead of using conscious intelligence to 
try to solve the problems which call it into being—and 
for the solution of which we have Butler’s authority for 


232 ' CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


saying it alone exists—we should use it merely to escape 
them, which is neither a logical conclusion nor a hopeful 
effort if, as we are told, it is precisely the persistence of 
these unsolved problems which makes us men, not 
animals. 

The fact is, as Butler’s work shows clearly, that com- 
mon sense is an elusive standard, which is always likely 
to become a two-edged weapon in the hands of him who 
uses it. Its voice is loud and strong upon only a few 
elementary questions relating to social cohesion and the 
preservation of life; but even concerning these matters 
its judgements are of the rough-and-ready kind, are in 
need of constant revision, and are often contradictory. 
It has no central or well-considered principles, and af- 
fords no basis for comprehensive views. Even when its 
voice is loudest, moreover, it may be a duty to oppose it 
—a duty which is fully recognized by succeeding genera- 
tions. It is probable that if Butler himself had had more 
of it he would have prized it less. And certainly it led 
him a strange chase. 

For he who so praised common sense and endeavoured 
to use it was led step by step from its plain, apparently 
impregnable dicta into conclusions not only extravagant 
and grotesque, not only contradictory of their own start- 
ing-point, but also inevitably self-destroying. What But- 
ler tells us comes to this: that the only certainties of life 
are things we do not and cannot know, that we know only 
delusions or doubts or unanswerable questions, and that 
our aim should be to sink from the immitigable evil of 
conscious existence into what for us would be equivalent 
to non-existence, or death. To pretend, as Butler does, 
that a state of complete unconsciousness would be com- 
pletely blissful is simply nonsense. Blissfulness is a state 
of feeling, and requires for its existence a conscious per- 
sonality. Butler’s goal is either one of sheer annihilation 


SAMUEL BUTLER 233 


or it is something utterly unintelligible, to whose mean- 
inglessness he succeeded in blinding himself by a succes- 
sion of verbal quibbles. 

He bids us realize—as, if we were not conscious indi- 
viduals, we could not—that individuality is a delusion, 
and that life as human beings can alone know it is a 
mockery. He bids us worship God, but robs God of all 
worshipful attributes. He builds his system on the con- 
cept of personality but, in order to do so, has to make 
the concept meaningless by impartially extending it to 
every atom of the universe and, as well, to the universe 
as a whole. He tells us to lead a life of enjoyment, but 
adds that complete enjoyment, like complete knowledge, 
is inconsistent with human life. By reaction from what 
he considers the unintelligibility of his contemporaries 
he leads us into a philosophy whose essence is contradic- 
tion and negation and the wholesale, timorous repudia- 
tion of life as human beings experience it and know it. 

Yet it is not possible to pretend that Butler went about 
his work of undermining all distinctions, all discrimina- 
tions, of confounding life in one inchoate mass of some 
unknowable, inconceivable tlfinking-substance, out of 
sheer perversity or love of paradox. Some of his ad- 
mirers who in their weakness have eagerly caught at his 
incidental faults of taste and his whimsicality may, 
doubtless, be thus easily dismissed, but hardly Butler. He 
was, in truth, forced into conclusions which he did not 
want any more than we want them, as long as we have 
left intelligence sufficient to perceive their real drift, 
because on a naturalistic basis he could go in no other 
direction. Being a more acute and consistent thinker 
than either Huxley or Arnold, he so worked out his natu- 
ralistic system as to put its self-destroying character in 
a clearer light than either of them ever did for his own 
efforts at a constructive view of life, but this is all that 


234 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


can be said for him. In an attempt to find some place for 
mind and purpose and the divine within the limits of 
naturalism, he could only succeed by robbing those terms 
of all meaning, transforming them in effect into syno- 
nyms for material substance. He was forced to deny 
certain of the data of experience more boldly and un- 
compromisingly than less clear-sighted exponents of 
naturalism, but even less than they could he avoid the 
denial of all that can make life significant or give it 
worth. 


VIL. 
THOMAS HARDY 


The Dynasts, a recent critic has said, ‘‘is the characteris- 
tic poem of our age; and characteristic in a profound 
fashion that has not been lately achieved by poetry 
among us—in the fashion of its philosophy. . . . In it 
we have artistic formation, definite and explicit, of the 
reach of man’s present consciousness of the world, of his 
conception of human and cosmic destiny, of mind’s chief 
traffic with the surrounding existence as far as the inevit- 
able and unsurmountable barriers. . . . The relation of 
known and unknowable is matter for emotion rather than 
for reason; and what this poem achieves is the presenting 
to emotion of a metaphysical idea held in some consistent 
and noble shaping. And this idea is one that underlies 
most of the intellectual life of our time; though the shap- 
ing is altogether the poet’s own. . . . We can only say 
(but of course it must be said without proposing further 
comparison) that this epic-drama of Thomas Hardy’s 18, 
in what may be called its conceptual poetry, akin to the 
works of Milton and Wordsworth in our literature, and 
beyond it to Faust and Prometheus Bound.” These are 
large claims, but few would now, I imagine, be inclined 
to dispute them, and they indicate the reason for attempt- 
ing a study of Mr. Hardy’s interpretation of life. This, 
Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, from whose volume my quo- 
tation comes, has scarcely done. He has not been able 
entirely to escape it, but he is primarily an artist-critic 
and his study of Mr. Hardy’s works consists chiefly of 
what in the business-world they term shop-talk. 


236 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Large claims have not always been made for Mr. 
Hardy; on the contrary, in the eighteen-nineties he was 
subjected to much abusive criticism.* He was called, in 
effect, a scavenger of the lower reaches of life, one who 
delighted to exhibit human baseness and depravity sim- 
ply for the perverse pleasure which he and others pre- 
sumably derived from the spectacle. How far from the 
truth this was everybody by the present time knows, but 
even to-day there may be some readers who have been 
surprised at finding the closing piece in Mr. Hardy’s 
latest volume of verse.? There, looking back over the 
years as he sits before a wood fire, he imagines his own 
voice speaking from it ‘on how he had walked when his 
sun was higher, his heart in its arrogancy’: 


“*You held not to whatsoever was true,’’ 
Said my own voice talking to me; 

“‘Whatsoever was just you were slack to see; 

Kept not things lovely and pure in view,”’’ 
Said my own voice talking to me. 


“You slighted her that endureth all,’’ 
Said my own voice talking to me; 

““Vaunteth not, trusteth hopefully ; 

That suffereth long and is kind withal,’’ 
Said my own voice talking to me. 


“You taught not that which you set about,’’ 
Said my own voice talking to me; 
““That the greatest of things is Charity... .”’ 


1 Examples may easily be found in the periodicals of the time. A readily 
accessible instance in a volume published during the period is to be seen in 
S. L. Wilson’s Theology of Modern Literature (1899). 

2 Written before the publication (on 13 November, 1925) of Human 
Shows: Far Phantasies: Songs and Trifles. 


THOMAS HARDY 237 


When a poet speaks, it is generally, if not always, 
best to suppose that he means exactly what he says; and 
when we take it in that Mr. Hardy actually set out to 
acclaim charity as the greatest of things, we find a far- 
stretching light cast upon some of his best-known work. 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the most obvious instance. 
It is the story of a ‘‘pure woman faithfully presented.”’ 
Tess is no Pamela Andrews, able successfully to calcu- 
late her course with a view to worldly advantage, skil- 
fully playing upon and using Alec D’Urberville’s passion 
as a means to obtain wealth and social position along 
with honourable marriage. She is at once better and 
worse than this, more honest and finer in grain, while less 
intelligent and less firm. Her feelings are instinctively 
pure and right, but she has a soft nature which conspires 
with chance to bring about the calamitous stages in her 
life, culminating in her final desperate murder of Alec 
D’Urberville and her own death upon the gallows. As a 
girl emerging into womanhood she had yielded herself 
to Alec, and had borne his child. The episode leads Mr. 
Hardy into contradictions, but, still, by one means if not 
by another, he makes his point convincingly. Tess did not 
give herself to Alec because of moral obliquity, and so 
after the experience she kept her purity of soul. More 
than this, the experience actually aided her development. 
As its result she changed, almost at a leap, ‘‘from simple 
girl to complex woman. Symbols of reflectiveness passed 
into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her 
voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She 
became what would have been called a fine creature; her 
aspect was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman 
whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two 
had quite failed to demoralize.’’ Hence she was, if any- 
thing, the more fit to make a true wife, and it would have 
been not charity so much as elementary justice had Angel 


238 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Clare been able to see this when, just after he had mar- 
ried her, she told him her story. He was not capable of it. 
Both temperament and his Christian upbringing united 
to blind him to the truth and to make him inflexibly hard 
in judgement. And thence ensued the tragic climax of the 
tale. 

Despite the personal irresponsibility of the characters, 
this is by general consent one of the few great English 
novels. It is so because of its high measure of truth, its 
tragic insight, and its intense, moving power. And in 
more than one incidental episode as well as in its central 
theme it is obviously a plea for charity, for a larger 
tolerance, for a repudiation of narrow, traditional appli- 
cations of moral principles which sacrifice truth and 
reality for appearances. It is a plea against arrogance 
howsoever concealed or sanctified, a plea for the under- 
standing heart, for the right hand of holy love extended 
freely to all suffering fellow-creatures. All of us alike 
are caught and twisted by circumstances which we vainly 
attempt to control, all, of us are subject to the freaks and 
unconscious cruelties of chance, none of us is pure enough 
to cast the first stone, and this should teach us forbear- 
ance and sympathy. Many of the evils of life are inherent 
in the nature of things, but at least man’s inhumanity 
to man is remediable, through the increase of charity, 
and here indeed lies the one open path of human prog- 
ress. 

Such would seem to be, briefly, Mr. Hardy’s reasoning, 
exemplified more or less completely in many of his books 
and poems besides Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Jude the 
Obscure is explicable in this light as in no other. One, 
though only one, reason for the abuse with which the 
book was greeted on its first appearance was its attack 
upon the institution of marriage. It was said to be a 
powerful and deliberate incitement to sexual immorality, 


THOMAS HARDY 239 


the more dangerous because of the deep feeling and 
mature skill with which it was written. And it may very 
fairly be urged that simply as an attack upon marriage 
the book is extremely unjust. But, of course, it is not 
simply this. Mr. Hardy obviously was moved by a pro- 
found indignation at the suffering caused to many indi- 
viduals by the institution in its present English form,’ 
and this suffering is undeniable, hideous, and often 
grossly immoral in its results. Jude is really a plea for a 
truer morality, for a more generous understanding and 
sympathy in our social judgements and in the enforce- 
ment of our social sanctions. It tells us, more, it shows 
us, what we well know yet fail to realize in action—that 
we are not all cast.in one mould, nor set amidst identi- 
cal circumstances, and that our neighbour’s life may 
markedly diverge from our own without being therefore 
damnable. It is, indeed, a modern homily upon a vener- 
able theme, showing how the letter of the law killeth, 
whereas the spirit giveth life. Was man made for the 
Sabbath, or the Sabbath for man? 

That Mr. Hardy conceived himself to be persevering 
in the same lesson even in writing The Dynasts is indi- 
cated more than once in the unfolding of that gigantic 
human scene, and perhaps accounts for his giving the 
last word in it to the Chorus of the Pities as well as for 
the note of hope which they utter. His consistent endeav- 
our to embody this meaning in his work, consequently, 
explains his statement in the Preface to Late Lyrics and 


3In a brief statement published in Hearst’s Magazine (June, 1912) Mr. 
Hardy wrote: ‘‘As the English marriage laws are, to the eyes of anybody 
who looks around, the gratuitous cause of at least half the misery of the 
community, that they are allowed to remain in force for a day is, to quote 
the famous last word of the ceremony itself, an ‘amazement,’ and can only 
be accounted for by the assumption that we live in a barbaric age, and are 
the slaves of gross superstition.’’ 


240 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Earlier that he regards himself as an exponent of evolu- 
tionary meliorism. He has always repudiated the common 
charge—if it be a charge—of pessimism, and we can 
readily see why. If the only hope of human betterment 
lies in greater charity, and in the changes which that 
implies, we must at once be forced not only to recognize, 
but to feel, existing evils as evils. Accordingly the true 
lover of mankind, seeking to increase the worth of life, 
is he who feelingly bares its wrongs and forces them into 
the common consciousness. Many years ago, as he says, 
he wrote ‘‘that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a 
full look at the Worst,’’ and later he expressed his view 
clearly in his lines To Sincerity: 


O sweet sincerity !— 
Where modern methods be 
What scope for thine and thee? 


Life may be sad past saying, 
Its greens for ever greying, 
Its faiths to dust decaying ; 


And youth may have foreknown it, 
And riper seasons shown it, 
But custom cries: ‘‘Disown it: 


‘“Say ye rejoice, though grieving, 
Believe, while unbelieving, 
Behold, without perceiving !’’ 


—Yet, would men look at true things, 
And unilluded view things, 
And count to bear undue things, 


The real might mend the seeming, 
Facts better their foredeeming, 
And Life its disesteeming. 


THOMAS HARDY 241 


Many of Mr. Hardy’s pieces, whether in prose or in 
verse, are in appearance simply pictures of the injustice 
to which we are subject or of the malign elements in 
human nature itself. They are open to grave misunder- 
standing—and the more so because of the irony he fre- 
quently and effectively uses—unless they are read as ful- 
filments of a deeply serious purpose, as instances of plain 
speaking rendered necessary by our sins. A fair example 
is The Ruined Maid: 


‘“O Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! 

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? 
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty ?’’— 
‘*O didn’t you know I’d been ruined ?”’ said she. 


—‘You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, 

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; 

And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three !’’— 
‘“Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’’ said she. 


—‘‘ At home in the barton you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ 
And ‘thik oon,’ and ‘theas oon,’ and ‘t’other’; but now 
Your talking quite fits ’ee for high compa-ny !’’— 
‘Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,”’ said she. 


—‘‘Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak, 
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek, 

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!’’— 

‘“We never do work when we’re ruined,’’ said she. 


—‘‘You used to call home-hfe a hag-ridden dream, 

And you’d sigh, and you’d sock; but at present you seem 
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly !’’— 

‘“True. One’s pretty lively when ruined,’’ said she. 


—‘‘T wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, 
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!’’— 
‘“My dear—a raw country girl, such as you be, 
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,’’ said she. 


242 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


One further example, The Pink Frock, must be quoted, 
out of many that almost equally deserve it: 


‘‘O my pretty pink frock, 

I sha’n’t be able to wear it! 

Why is he dying just now? 
I hardly can bear it! 


‘‘He might have contrived to live on; 
But they say there’s no hope whatever: 
And must I shut myself up, 

And go out never? 


‘‘O my pretty pink frock, 

Puff-sleeved and accordion-pleated ! 

He might have passed in July, 
And not so cheated!”’ 


Yet, complains Mr. Hardy, not even all his disclaimers 
and explanations suffice to prevent him from still being 
called a pessimist. And indeed, considering the looseness 
of popular language, this should probably be expected by 
one who writes and publishes many pieces in prose and 
verse comparable to The Pink Frock; but there is a fur- 
ther and more legitimate reason. For Mr. Hardy’s work 
contains elements which his explanation by no means 
covers, and in fact he has himself also warned his readers 
not to expect from him a systematic or consistent illus- 
tration of any one general view of the world. On the con- 
trary, he has insisted that his works constitute a series 
of fugitive impressions set down as they have come, with 
no attempt at codrdination. The reason for this, and the 
extent to which it can be accepted, will be discussed later, 
though the contention has an obvious ground which must 
at once be mentioned. For it is a fact that Mr. Hardy has 
been singularly faithful, sincere, and courageous in the 


THOMAS HARDY 243 


attempt to follow experience whithersoever it might lead 
him. And this in itself merits, as it has increasingly re- 
ceived, high praise. But it can scarcely be allowed that 
this is alone sufficient to give him out of hand the supreme 
place in modern literature which some in recent years 
have claimed for him. The claim is not unnatural in an 
age of specialism which has driven perplexed critics back 
into the narrower recesses of their field, where they may 
talk with some assurance of literature as a problem in 
craftsmanship, but, still, it cannot be admitted as legiti- 
mate. For an artist’s greatness depends in the end, and 
always must depend, upon the quality of his experience 
as well as upon his honesty and skill in dealing with it. 

And this matter of quality is in Mr. Hardy’s case ren- 
dered doubtful by the fact that his effort to follow im- 
pressions wherever they might lead has submerged him 
in a fundamental contradiction, strange in its character 
though familiar enough in the present age. Hor he began 
his career in mid-Victorian days, living in an atmosphere 
charged by a militant and wonderfully confident system 
of thought which was supposed to have behind it all the 
authority of exact science, and he was no more able than 
were others to resist the seeming attractions of the 
‘mechanical philosophy.’ Consequently his observation 
of the very aspects of existence which roused his humani- 
tarian fervour and caused him to make deeply moving 
pleas for the increase of charity also helped to convince 
him that human beings were capable of no responsible 
acts whatever. The two things, of course, completely 
cancel each other, since unless we have some real free- 
dom it is useless to talk to us about charitable acts or any 
other responsible deeds. Yet this is what Mr. Hardy did ; 
persisting in his humanitarian intention, he nevertheless 
came increasingly to interpret life on the basis of a de- 
terministic monism. Even in holding to this, however, he 


244 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


has not freed himself from a further confusion; for, as 
we shall see, he speaks much of chance, and at times falls 
into the indifferentism which logically issues from the 
view that all things are the product of sheer accident or 
‘‘erass casualty.’’ He has, none the less, while continuing 
to the end to hold both views in a somewhat unstable 
combination, clearly given the predominance to determin- 
ism. Hence | shall in what follows make no special effort 
to disentangle this secondary confusion, if I may so term 
it, though the evidence for its existence will appear 
throughout, and I shall presently indicate what appears, 
at least, to be Mr. Hardy’s method of combining these 
diverse views. 

They are expressed plainly in many of his novels and 
poems, and with unqualified emphasis in The Dynasts, 
where the great pageant of the Napoleonic wars is pre- 
sented wholly as an example of human irresponsibility 
and helplessness under the constraining pressure of blind 
cosmic forces. As is well known, Mr. Hardy has clothed 
his thought in The Dynasts in the language of Schopen- 
hauer, which he has also used in some of his poems and, 
to a smaller extent, in several of his novels.* It seems 
clear, however, that he did not turn to Schopenhauer 
quite as to a new evangelist, but rather as to one who, he 
found, had conveniently provided for him a seemingly 


4 His indebtedness to Schopenhauer has recently been exhibited in detail 
by Mr. Ernest Brennecke, jr., in Thomas Hardy’s Universe (1924), and 
was discussed some years ago by Dr. Helen Garwood in Thomas Hardy, an 
Illustration of the Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1911). Both books are 
efforts after scholarly exactness, though the former is the more mature 
piece of work. Both seem to me misleading in their general effect. It may 
be mentioned that Dr. Garwood received a letter from Mr. Hardy in which, 
She says, he spoke ‘‘of his philosophy being a development from Schopen- 
hauer through later philosophers.’’ There is clear evidence (which no in- 
vestigator has yet gathered with parallels) of his study of von Hartmann, 
of whom he himself speaks in the Preface to Late Lyrics and Earlier. 


THOMAS HARDY 245 


adequate and appropriate vocabulary for the expression 
of some of his own conclusions. Consequently, though this 
influence has an obvious significance and a further mean- 
ing which will later be indicated, its importance can 
easily be exaggerated. Clearly Mr. Abercrombie is right 
in asserting that the ideas embodied in The Dynasts 
underlie ‘‘most of the intellectual life of our time,’’ and 
the cause of understanding is not well served by attempts 
to narrow unduly the influences which have communi- 
eated to Mr. Hardy what may, with as much accuracy as 
is possible in such matters, be termed a major ‘spirit of 
the age.’ The thing of primary importance from the 
present view-point is the nature itself of the picture pre- 
sented in The Dynasts. 

It is foreshadowed in the opening scene, where the 
supernatural intelligences—‘‘contrivances of the fancy 
merely,’? as Mr. Hardy tells us—speak to each other 
concerning the universe and approaching events upon 
the earth. We are informed that the universe can only 
be conceived as something fashioned and controlled by a 
blind sense or will, working unconsciously, which no force 
can swerve from applying its clock-like laws. Says the 
Spirit of the Years: 


In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being, 
Nothing appears of shape to indicate 
That cognizance has marshalled things terrene, 
Or will (such is my thinking) in my span. 
Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed, 
Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness, 
The Will has woven with an absent heed 
Since life first was; and ever will so weave. 


Amongst the Will’s productions are, of course, our- 
selves, ‘flesh-hinged manikins wound up to click-clack off 
laws’ designed without regard to our happiness or suffer- 


246 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ing, life or death. We are puppets whose self-conscious- 
ness gives us merely the illusion of responsible and intel- 
ligent action. In reality we act we know not why, because 
we must, and all our fears and hopes and scruples and 
calculations and moral standards are alike meaningless 
vanities. This The Dynasts illustrates in a long succes- 
sion of scenes, many of which taken singly are uninter- 
esting enough, in many of which the verse is undistin- 
guished or distressingly pedestrian, but which in their 
cumulative effect are unparalleled in English literature, 
perhaps in any literature, for their immense sweep and 
sombre grandeur. Yet all the European peoples and their 
leaders who enter into this great pageant only unite to 
exhibit the unmeaning emptiness and bottomless futility 
of life. The lesson is emphasized very early in the drama, 
when the Shade of the Earth asks the Spirit of the Years: 


What boots it, Sire, 
To down this dynasty, set that one up, 
Goad panting peoples to the throes thereof, 
Make wither here my fruit, maintain it there, 
And hold me travailling through fineless years 
In vain and objectless monotony, 
When all such tedious conjuring could be shunned 
By uncreation? Howsoever wise 
The governance of these massed mortalities, 
A juster wisdom his who should have ruled 
They had not been. 


SPIRIT OF THE YEARS 


Nay, something hidden urged 
The giving matter motion; and these coils 
Are, maybe, good as any. 


SPIRIT OF THE PITIES 
But why any? 


THOMAS HARDY 247 


SPIRIT OF THE YEARS 
Sprite of Compassions, ask the Immanent! 
I am but an accessory of Its works, 
Whom the Ages render conscious; and at most 
Figure as bounden witness of Its laws. 


SPIRIT OF THE PITIES 
How ask the aim of unrelaxing Will 
Tranced in Its purpose to unknowingness ? 
(If thy words, Ancient Phantom, token true). 


SPIRIT OF THE YEARS 


Thou answerest well. But cease to ask of me. 
Meanwhile the mime proceeds. 


The mime proceeds!—turning to the sphere of human 
life, we behold our fellow-creatures busily engaged in 
actions they deem purposeful and important. At this 
moment the British House of Commons is engaged in 
deliberations which end in a division sustaining Pitt’s 
ministry, whereupon the Spirit of the Pities remarks: 


It irks me that they thus should Yea and Nay 
As though a power lay in their oraclings, 
If each decision work unconsciously, 
And would be operant though unloosened were 
A single lip! 

SPIRIT oF RuMOUR 

There may react on things 


Some influence from these, indefinitely, 
And even on That, whose outcome we all are. 


To which the Spirit of the Years replies, ‘‘ Hypotheses !”’ 
- and so dismisses the vague guess. Not even the bare pos- 
sibility that human beings have any measure of control 
over their lives and fortunes is to be treated seriously. 
And of all the thousands who play their parts in the 


248 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


drama only two or three have the slightest inkling of 
their real situation, while of these Napoleon is the only 
one who distinctly voices his occasional realization of it, 
when he says to Josephine: 


Some force within me, baffling mine intent, 
Harries me onward, whether I will or no. 
My star, my star is what’s to blame—not I. 
It is unswervable! 


After which the Spirit of the Years observes: 


He spoke thus at the Bridge of Lodi. Strange, 
He’s of the few in Europe who discern 
The working of the Will. 


Napoleon’s discernment, which enables him to transgress 
moral standards without compunction, is later com- 
mended by one of the supernatural intelligences, but his 
freedom from remorse is its only profit to him, as his 
discernment gives him no foresight and no control over 
his acts. 

Mr. Hardy, then, pictures the universe as a self-sufh- 
cient mechanism, or as a single huge organism. Its phe- 
nomena are all controlled by an unknowable force im- 
manent in them or, in other words, an integral part of 
the whole. We may call this, if we like, an impulse or will 
towards ceaseless ordered movement, but we really know 
nothing about it. We only know that all phenomena, in- 
cluding ourselves, are basically identical parts of one 
whole which is moving along its own course. This course 
has nothing in common with our conscious purposes, 
desires, or feelings, so that we cannot conceive of it as 
either conscious or purposive. At the same time, however, 
we must conceive of our own distinctive traits, such as 
conscience or remorse, implying as they do responsibility 
on our part, as delusive. Not only are we really helpless, 


THOMAS HARDY 249 


but all our necessitated actions are, from any human 
point of view, entirely futile. We are the mere creatures 
of what, judging by its workings, we can only term blind 
accident. 

It is in this way that Mr. Hardy appears to combine 
his determinism with the view that all things are the 
product of sheer chance. As far as we can judge, he seems 
to say, we are the helpless creatures of accident, yet the 
necessitated movements of matter follow ordered pat- 
terns, and thus have a common character, even though 
they are not so closely woven together as to form a single 
coherent whole in which chance can find no place. Hence 
there is some objective ground for supposing that nature 
forms a purposive system. Even, however, if she does 
so, she follows a purpose which we cannot fathom and 
which has no regard for our happiness, our welfare, or 
our existence itself. Thus in either case our lives are 
determined by factors utterly regardless of us their 
creatures, and practically it is a matter of indifference 
whether the truth lie in one direction or the other. If, 
however, we are not to believe that the world and all it 
supports are simply chaos within chaos—and against this 
there is the evidence of ordered movement all around us 
—the only alternative is a deterministic monism. Occa- 
sionally, as I have said, Mr. Hardy lapses into the indif- 
ferentism which follows from the view that all is acci- 
dent, but generally, even when he seems unqualifiedly to 
accept this view, he reacts strongly against it;—that is, 
he writes as if there were something, an order, a system, 
a universe, against which to react, and so shows that it is 
a naturalism, even though somewhat vaguely and para- 
doxically conceived, which he has predominantly in his 
mind. In Hap, a sonnet written as long ago as 1866, he 
expressed plainly what has been his prevailing tone, his 
manner of reaction against the bitterness of the human 


250 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


lot, though at that time, as will be seen, he was appar- 
ently content to ascribe all that is to chance alone: 


If but some vengeful god would call to me 

From up the sky, and laugh: ‘'Thou suffering thing, 
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 

That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting !”’ 


Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, 
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited ; 
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I 

Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 


But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, 

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, 
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan... . 
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. 


While this sonnet on the one hand indicates the hope- 
lessness and bitterness of our situation as the playthings 
of ‘‘crass casualty,’’ on the other it indicates that this is 
by no means the whole of our misery. For although we 
are the puppets of real or seeming chance, our feelings 
and desires are genuine and intense. This it is which 
gives intolerable poignancy to our situation. Our feelings 
and desires are genuine, yet life pays no heed to them, or 
rather is bound to frustrate our desires and violate our 
feelings. And the quality of either makes no difference 
in the result. It is all one whether a man be a saint or a 
sinner; these are mere conventional differences with no 
root in the nature of things. It would be a folly to set up 
such distinctions could we help it, because, even were we 
able to determine our courses, there would be really no 
choice to be made. The feelings of saint and sinner are 
alike irrelevant to the nature of things, and the desires 
of both are equally vain and impotent. 


THOMAS HARDY 251 


Had we been fashioned unconscious manikins, the proc- 
esses of which we form a part would have been as mean- 
ingless as now they are, but at least there could have 
been no complaint ;—there would, indeed, then have been 
no one to complain. But actually we do have the capacity 
both to enjoy and to suffer, while only the latter is genu- 
inely satisfied. This is the final, insoluble enigma which 
confronts Mr. Hardy. Why we should exist, even were 
we blessedly unconscious of the fact, he cannot see, 
whereas consciousness simply adds tragedy to what was 
before incomprehensible. This conviction is voiced in T’he 
Dynasts and in many of his poems, as well as in Tess of 
the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. In The Dynasts, 
after the Battle of Ulm, the Spirit Ironic says that the 
‘‘Will Itself might smile at this collapse of Austria’s 
men-at-arms, so drolly done,’’ to which the Chorus of 
the Years replies: 


Ah, no: ah, no! 
It is impassible as glacial snow.— 
Within the Great Unshaken 
These painted shapes awaken 
A lesser thrill than doth the gentle lave 
Of yonder bank by Danube’s wandering wave 
Within the Schwarzwald heights that give it flow! 


SprriIT OF THE PITIES 


But O, the intolerable antilogy 
Of making figments feel! 


Spirit [RoNnIc 
Logic’s in that. 
It does not, I must own, quite play the game. 


Again, later, at the death of Nelson the Spirit of the 
Pities is moved to indignation at the nature of things 


202 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


when contemplating the several hours of useless suffer- 
ing which intervene between the time when the great 
admiral is shot down and the moment of his death, and 
Pity says to the Spirit of the Years: 


Out of tune the Mode and meritless 
That quickens sense in shapes whom, thou hast said, 
Necessitation sways! A life there was 
Among these self-same frail ones—Sophocles— 
Who visioned it too clearly, even the while 
He dubbed the Will ‘‘the gods.’’ Truly said he, 
‘‘Such gross injustice to their own creation 
Burdens the time with mournfulness for us, 
And for themselves with shame.’”°—Things mechanized 
By coils and pivots set to foreframed codes 
Would, in a thorough-sphered melodic rule, 
And governance of sweet consistency, 
Be cessed no pain, whose burnings would abide 
With That Which holds responsibility, 
Or inexist. 


CHORUS OF THE PITIES 
Yea, yea, yea! 
Thus would the Mover pay 
The score each puppet owes, 
The Reaper reap what his contrivance sows! 
Why make Life debtor when it did not buy? 
Why wound so keenly Right that it would die? 


To such questions Mr. Hardy has no answer. He only 
says that existence is a mockery or curse, and that it 
would be better for us to be dead than alive—a proposi- 
tion laid down and fully illustrated in Jude the Obscure 
and in some of his poems. 7'0 the Moon is a fairly light- 
hearted instance: 


5 Trachinie, ll, 1266-1272. The words are spoken by Hyllus. 


THOMAS HARDY 253 


‘‘What have you looked at, Moon, 
In your time, 
Now long past your prime ?”’ 
‘<Q, I have looked at, often looked at 
Sweet, sublime, 
Sore things, shudderful, night and noon 
In my time.’’ 


‘‘What have you mused on, Moon, 
In your day, 
So aloof, so far away?’ 
‘(QO I have mused on, often mused on 
Growth, decay, 
Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon, 
In my day!’’ 
‘‘Have you much wondered, Moon, 
On your rounds, 
Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds?’ 
‘Yea, I have wondered, often wondered 
At the sounds 
Reaching me of the human tune 
On my rounds.”’ 


‘“What do you think of it, Moon, 
As you go? 
Is Life much, or no?”’ 
“OI think of it, often think of it 
As a show 
God ought surely to shut up soon, 
As I go.”’ 


Meanwhile, since the show is not yet shut up, we can- 
not help asking why, nor can we help complaining bitterly 
against the nature of things. Mr. Hardy has written a 
number of poems in which he tells us what must be the 
character of any deity we can imagine as the creator of 


254 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ourselves and the world we inhabit. They are not flatter- 
ing. New Year’s Eve may serve as an example: 


‘‘T have finished another year,’’ said God, 
‘‘In grey, green, white, and brown; 
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod, 
Sealed up the worm within the clod, 
And let the last sun down.’’ 


‘‘And what’s the good of it?’’ I said, 
‘“What reasons made you call 

From formless void this earth we tread, 

When nine-and-ninety can be read 
Why nought should be at all? 


‘Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in 
This tabernacle groan’— 

If ever a joy be found herein, 

Such joy no man had wished to win 
If he had never known!”’ 


Then he: ‘‘My labours—logicless— 

You may explain; not I: 
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess 
That I evolved a Consciousness 

To ask for reasons why. 


‘‘Strange that ephemeral creatures who 
By my own ordering are, 
Should see the shortness of my view, 
Use ethic tests I never knew, 
Or made provision for!’’ 


He sank to raptness as of yore, 
And opening New Year’s Day 

Wove it by rote as theretofore, 

And went on working evermore 
In his unweeting way. 


THOMAS HARDY 255 


In another poem, God’s Education, the deity is imagined 
as being gradually taught to improve his moral sense by 
listening to the admonitions of man; while in A Plaint to 
Man God asks why man ever had to create him as an 
object of prayer, because, since then, 


The doing without me has had no play 
In the minds of men when shadows scare ; 


And now that I dwindle day by day 
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers 
In a light that will not let me stay, 


And to-morrow the whole of me disappears, 
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced 
That had best been faced in earlier years: 


The fact of life with dependence placed 
On the human heart’s resource alone, 
In brotherhood bonded close and graced 


With loving-kindness fully blown, 
And visioned help unsought, unknown. 


In God’s Funeral the dwindling deity is at length finally 
discredited and buried; but this consummation in no wise 
lightens the weight of Mr. Hardy’s bitterness against the 
nature of things, as can be seen in The Blow: 


That no man schemed it is my hope— 
Yea, that it fell by will and scope 

Of That Which some enthrone, 
And for whose meaning myriads grope. 


For I would not that of my kind 

There should, of his unbiassed mind, 
Have been one known 

Who such a stroke could have designed ; 


256 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Since it would augur works and ways 
Below the lowest that man assays 

To have hurled that stone 
Into the sunshine of our days! 


And if it prove that no man did, 

And that the Inscrutable, the Hid, 
Was cause alone 

Of this foul crash our lives amid, 


I’ll go in due time, and forget 
In some deep graveyard’s oubliette 
The thing whereof I groan, 
And cease from troubling; thankful yet 


Time’s finger should have stretched to show 
No aimful author’s was the blow 

That swept us prone, 
But the Immanent Doer’s That doth not know 


Which in some age unguessed of us 
May lift Its blinding incubus, 

And see, and own: 
‘It grieves me I did thus and thus 


!?? 


The burden of Mr. Hardy’s indictment against life or 
against the nature of things comes down to this: that 
since everything in our lives is necessitated by something 
outside of our own sense of purpose and beyond our con- 
trol, and since this entails upon us real but meaningless 
suffering, the source of our being can only be described 
by us as unconscious and without purpose. It follows that 
there is unescapable injustice in our having conscious- 
ness at all and, much more, intolerable injustice in our 
being endowed with ‘‘the disease of feeling.’’ No one can 
fathom any reason for our existence and no one can deny 
its combined suffering and futility. 

Mr. Hardy tells us that he began life as a believer in 


THOMAS HARDY 207 


Christianity. His works do not indicate clearly the path 
which led him far from the orthodox fold, but, neverthe- 
less, his general course can be traced with a degree of 
certainty. The dates affixed to some of his poems show 
that such Christian beliefs as he once had must have 
become impossible for him about the time he reached 
manhood or very shortly thereafter. He did not relin- 
quish these beliefs gladly, but with sorrow and with at 
least some tendency to condemn himself for his inability 
to find in Christian faith the reality or solace which 
others found there. At the same time, however, he felt a 
certainty of being in the right of it which soon overtopped 
his mood of humility, though it perhaps did not so 
quickly drown his regret at what he had lost. 

What caused this initial change? It was apparently a 
combination of experience and philosophy, each seeming 
to reinforce the other. He doubtless had been taught that 
Christianity was a miraculously revealed body of truths 
and, for the rest, his belief seems largely to have con- 
sisted in the propositions that everything had been provi- 
dentially arranged for man’s convenience and that jus- 
tice was the fundamental law of life. Unfortunately it is 
not at all incredible that this should have been so. But, of 
course, it took only the slightest reflexion upon experi- 
ence to show that there were fundamental difficulties in 
such beliefs. Man’s life was in reality an unceasing strug- 
ele against both his natural and his human environments, 
and a struggle conditioned by many factors—such, for 
instance, as heredity, parentage, social customs—for 
which he-was in no way responsible and yet which always 
influenced and sometimes predetermined the outcome. 
There were factors both of personal circumstances and 
of temperament which greatly facilitated such disillu- 
sioning discoveries. And, as has already been said, Mr. 
Hardy, who was born in 1840, reached manhood at a time 


258 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


when naturalistic thought was undergoing an immense 
revival of prestige through the progress of the exact 
sciences and particularly through Darwin’s seeming 
proof of the evolution hypothesis. To one who could not 
be indifferent to philosophical and religious questions, 
naturalism at this time appeared to offer with all the 
authority of exact science an unifying conception embrac- 
ing the whole round of reality and likewise completely 
accounting for the very facts of experience which had 
unsettled a comfortable theistic faith. And the result was 
Mr. Hardy’s conversion to a deterministic monism. 

The change, however, opened up new difficulties in 
place of those it had resolved. For their understanding 
something must first be said of naturalism as it has 
usually developed by way of reaction from religion. The 
naturalistic point of view has always had the implicit 
support of common sense and has always had a strong 
attraction for men of secular, sensuous temperament. 
There has been from the beginning, as far as can be 
known, a practical dualism in human nature, exemplified 
by standards of conduct, based on religious sanctions, 
which have been hard to live up to. There has ever been 
a war within ourselves; impulses have pulled us in con- 
trary directions, and we have ventured to ascribe a divine 
origin to some of these, while others we have stigmatized 
as base, wrong, or sinful. In general these evil impulses 
are strong and universal, their satisfaction gives an un- 
mistakable, immediate pleasure, and we share a number 
of them with the rest of the animal kingdom. Good im- 
pulses, on the other hand, are generally weaker and may 
be almost absent from many men, their satisfaction 
usually does not result in immediate pleasure and may 
even be painful, and they are almost exclusively peculiar 
to humanity. It may be said that what is good tends on 
the whole to promote human life;—that is, it is either 


THOMAS HARDY 209 


advantageous to the community of which we are a part, 
although it may be painful to us as individuals, or it 
tends to develop and make predominant what 1s specifi- 
cally human in us as opposed to those other elements in 
our nature which we share with other animals. 

Occasionally some man has had so overwhelming a 
sense of the importance of these good or specifically 
human elements in our nature and so clear an insight 
into their meaning and character as to be able to impress 
his conviction regarding our situation and needs upon 
a whole nation or group of nations. But these are not 
obvious matters, and we are peculiarly liable to make 
mistakes about them. In this direction we are pioneers 
feeling our way towards the opening-up of a wholly new 
path. And even the wisest man, or rather any man just in 
proportion as he is wise, if he ventures to talk to others, 
is limited by what they can be made to understand. Con- 
sequently new standards or ideals are the more likely to 
be overlaid with falsehood and superstition the more 
widely they are received. They are supported with blind 
and indiscriminate zeal, or with the wrong reasons, or 
they are clothed in symbolic language which itself be- 
comes sacred and inviolable, though actually it was in- 
tended only as a makeshift whose usefulness depended 
on its relevance to the surrounding conditions of those 
for whom it was framed. Nor is this all, for concrete 
applications of standards and ideals become similarly 
sacred and inviolable. Yet man’s environment is con- 
stantly changing and so demanding what never takes 
place soon enough—the equally constant revision of the 
language in which standards and ideals are stated and 
supported, and of the codes of conduct which embody 
their practical applications. 

Hence there have always been periods when it has been 
extremely easy for a self-confident man of sensuous tem- 


260 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


perament and limited insight to conclude that the reli- 
gious sanctions of good conduct are a mere sort of make- 
believe; and thus far even religious men may perforce 
have agreed with him, because they could not help seeing 
that the current religion was an outworn shell, a relic of 
the formalism of a past age ;—or because they could not 
help seeing that, as has sometimes happened with de- 
cayed religions, it actually was preserving beliefs and 
practices which did violence to the moral sense. But of 
course the self-confident man would not stop here. Re- 
volting from palpably superstitious beliefs, he concludes 
not only that there are no elements of truth underlying 
them, but also that the conduct connected with them is 
harmful. In some respects, moreover, this may really be 
so, because, as was said, conduct, like language, is a rela- 
tive matter; it must needs change with changing condi- 
tions. Conduct which once was right may now be evil, or 
vice versa, because of the discriminating application, 
under varying conditions, of one unchanging principle. 
It is not, however, in the interest of a wise and careful 
revision of the ‘commandments’ that the revolt being 
described takes place. This is a difficult and delicate work, 
requiring for success extreme pains and patience, while 
the rebel against pious usages has no motives impelling 
him to such a task. On the contrary, he has powerful 
reasons for denying or remaining oblivious of its possi- 
bility. For his quarrel is really with difficult conduct as 
such, and he merely seizes for his own purpose on some 
practical rule left exposed to his onslaught by blind reli- 
sious conservatism. 

This the rebel does because he is, like the rest of us, 
troubled by the dualism of human nature and longs to 
do away with it, while he has little either inside himself 
or around him to aid him in understanding its character. 
Hence he concludes that this troublesome and dark con- 


THOMAS HARDY 261 


flict within our members is not inherent in human nature, 
but is imposed by some men on others for interested rea- 
sons ;—our fears and scruples are played upon by priests 
for the sake of maintaining and enhancing their own 
power and welfare. Thus he appears as the true friend 
and liberator of mankind when he proceeds to announce 
that men’s irrational beliefs and the painful or, as we 
say, unnatural conduct accompanying them are not good, 
but absurd and injurious. Human nature, he says, is one, 
not dual, and we are all members of one body; our only 
voddess is our ancient mother, Nature herself, the kindly 
nurse of all her children great and small, and she has 
given us in our natural impulses all we need in order to 
our welfare. Can she have done less for us than she has 
for the cattle of the field and the beasts of the forest? 
Surely not! We ought, then, to trust our strongest, uni- 
versal impulses, forsaking all mere man-made laws, and, 
so doing, we shall return to the good heart of things from 
which we have strayed, and shall regain that golden unity 
of nature which it is unalloyed happiness to possess—a 
happiness only known to us hitherto in tragically brief, 
stolen moments of elemental ecstasy, in which the voice 
of conscience was hushed and the weary battle forgotten. 

To many thoughtful people in the latter half of the 
nineteenth century a variety of considerations, including 
the discoveries of science, and particularly those bearing 
on evolution, seemed imperatively to call for this natu- 
ralistic conclusion, and Mr. Hardy was amongst them. 
In one of his infrequent essays he stated that his purpose 
in his novels was the handling of tragic motives in terms 
of modern knowledge, and that he sought ‘‘to show Na- 
ture’s unconsciousness not of essential laws, but of those 
laws framed merely as social expedients by humanity, 
without a basis in the heart of things’’; and he added that 
he aimed to give his material ‘‘treatment which expresses 


262 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


the triumph of the crowd over the hero, of the common- 
place majority over the exceptional few.’”* In several of 
his novels, including notably Far from the Madding 
Crowd, The Return of the Native, and The Woodlanders, 
he sought in greater or less degree to submerge his char- 
acters in their natural surroundings and so to exhibit the 
oneness of man and nature. Men were to be regarded as 
outgrowths of the soil, like trees or brambles, the mobile 
products of vast germinative forces, with no independent 
powers properly to be called their own. And in Tess of 
the D’Urbervilles, after Tess’s irregular union with Alec 
D’Urberville and the birth of their child, he attempted | 
to make credible her continuing purity of character 
partly by explaining that what she had more or less will- 
ingly done was not unnatural, was indeed simply what in 
the world of nature would be taken as a matter of course, 
and that she was ‘guilty’ only of violating man-made 
laws ‘framed as social expedients and without a basis in 
the heart of things.’ | 

Mr. Hardy could not, however, rest in this position. 
Impressively as contemporary discoveries and thought 
seemed to point to the basic unity not only of all organic 
creatures but of the whole universe of phenomena, still, 
evolutionary doctrine also exhibited the processes of 
nature as full of savage cruelty and ruthlessness. Nature 
was, in fact, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ and to return to her 
bosom was to return to something worse than barbarism, 
to a world dehumanized, necessitated in all its workings 
by forces wholly indifferent to, if not at all points op- 
posed to, everything in life valued by human beings. 
This, Mr. Hardy, with his sensitiveness and honesty of 
feeling, could not help but perceive, and accordingly in 
the three earlier of the above-mentioned novels he showed 


6 Candour in English Fiction (The New Review, January, 1890). 


THOMAS HARDY 263 


himself to be by no means unconscious of certain malign 
aspects of the natural world, while in 7’ess this conscious- 
ness at length appeared with unqualified strength, and 
at a heavy expense in congruity. For Tess contains a 
number of passages which make up a bitter indictment 
of the fair-seeming order of nature. Portions of the same 
indictment are repeated in a number of his poems, and 
an illuminating instance is the one entitled In a Wood, 
where a few lines of mere observation of fact contained 
in The Woodlanders are amplified and given a quite new 
meaning : 


Pale beech and pine so blue, 
Set in one clay, 

Bough to bough cannot you 
Live out your day? 

When the rains skim and skip, 

Why mar sweet comradeship, 

Blighting with poison-drip 
Neighbourly spray? 


Heart-halt and spirit-lame, 
City-opprest, 
Unto this wood I came 
As to a nest; 
Dreaming that sylvan peace 
Offered the harrowed ease— 
Nature a soft release 
From men’s unrest. 


But, having entered in, 
Great growths and small 
Show them to men akin— 
Combatants all! 
Sycamore shoulders oak, 
Bines the slim sapling yoke, 
Ivy-spun halters choke 
Elms stout and tall. 


264 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


Touches from ash, O wych, 
Sting you like scorn! 

You, too, brave hollies, twitch 
Sidelong from thorn. 

Even the rank poplars bear 

Lothly a rival’s air, 

Cankering in black despair 
If overborne. 


Sinee, then, no grace I find 
Taught me of trees, 

Turn I back to my kind, 
Worthy as these. 

There at least smiles abound, 

There discourse trills around, 

There, now and then, are found 
Life-loyalties. 


One might suppose that a man who had made this dis- 
covery, who had the courage to face it, and who was 
honestly seeking the truth, would have come to the 
obvious conclusion that after all naturalism was in the 
wrong of it. Naturalism, one might think he would have 
seen, was merely one more attempt to comprehend the 
universe in a generalization based on man’s very limited 
experience and, moreover, based on only an arbitrarily 
selected portion of it, illegitimately leaving out of the 
account as it did the data of experience which pointed 
to a fundamental divergence between man and the natu- 
ral world. And consequently he might have been forced 
back on the conclusion that human nature was inherently 
dual in character; man was an animal, certainly, and in 
his animality was firmly linked to the world of phe- 
nomena, and so far was wholly one with beasts, or even 
with the beech-tree and the pine-tree; but man was at the 


THOMAS HARDY 265 


same time something other than an animal, extending his 
being to the experience of something beyond the phe- 
nomenal world, to the experience of something no less 
real to him in the world of values—the world where, 
somehow, ‘‘smiles abound,’’ and, ‘‘now and then, are 
found life-loyalties.”’ 

Actually, however, Mr. Hardy did nothing of the sort. 
Naturalism he had espoused, and to it he still gave his 
undivided allegiance, even though this now caused him 
extraordinary difficulties. His insight and honesty forced 
him to repudiate the optimistical cosmic dreams of many 
of his contemporaries, but could not force him to forgo 
the vanity of cosmic dreams themselves. In his prefaces 
he has exhibited symptoms of the ‘fear-of-giving-himself- 
away disease’ but, nevertheless, has not obscured the fact 
that a monistic world he was bound to have, whatever the 
cost. Accordingly, his formulation of his experience was 
subject to this prejudice. He concluded, as has been 
shown, that the phenomenal world, of which we are a 
part, is a non-moral, purposeless, meaningless complex 
of appearances exhibiting a single gross anomaly, prob- 
ably the result of blundering accident, in human con- 
sciousness. The inner world revealed by consciousness— 
the world of feeling, values, and purpose—he pronounced 
unreal. It is unreal, not in the sense that we do not 
actually have feelings and desires and aims, but in the 
sense that these are merely subjective excitations not 
corresponding to objective reality, so that they are 
doomed to be violated and frustrated at the hands of the 
indifferent world. 


I sat. It was all past; 

Hope never would hail again ; 
Fair days had ceased at a blast, 
The world was a darkened den. 


266 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


The beauty and dream were gone, 
And the halo in which I had hied 
So gaily gallantly on 

Had suffered blot and died! 


I went forth, heedless whither, 

In a cloud too black for name: 
—People frisked hither and thither; 
The world was just the same. 


This unreality to which we are subject is that which 
causes a division between us and the phenomenal world 
and which makes life a burden to us—a burden the more 
real and terrible both because we do sometimes snatch 
delusive joys from life but cannot keep them, and be- 
cause we endure all our unescapable pains and hard- 
ships for no conceivable end. Consequently the one bless- 
ing we can look forward to and possess is the oblivion of 
death. 

This suggests the question how Mr. Hardy can have 
come to such a conclusion with the confidence, and even 
pride, which he evidently feels in it. The obvious answer 
is simple enough: that he has fearlessly attempted to be 
faithful at any cost to his own experience, as the one 
immediate certainty accessible to him. This may be 
eranted; it is not likely that there is any one more honest 
than Mr. Hardy, and his honesty gives a certain value to 
his work of which no other consideration can deprive it. 
But faithfulness to experience is not the simple matter 
which it is often taken to be and, in addition, any one 
man’s experience is bound to be extremely limited, may 
be extraordinary, and may indicate that the man himself 
is no true protagonist of humanity. 

Nor is this all, for it is not easy to see how a man can 
attribute any value to his own thought who regards 
human beings as mere cunning machines, regulated by a 


THOMAS HARDY 267 


non-human force which renders all their ideas illusory. 
If this be so, how can any of us discover it? The man who 
pretends to do so must, if he knows what he is about, 
consider himself an unique phenomenon, different in kind 
from the rest of humanity. There is that in Mr. Hardy’s 
manner at times which almost suggests that he does make 
so audacious a claim. As Lionel Johnson remarked, his 
‘‘novels are not written for a purpose, to prove the truth 
of something; but with the prejudice, that it is a proven 
truth.’’* Nevertheless it is incredible that this should be 
the explanation of Mr. Hardy’s self-assurance, so that it 
must be sought elsewhere. 

In the first place, then, faithfulness to experience is not 
a simple matter because impressions can never be ex- 
pressed or communicated directly, but only through some 
medium. This always offers difficulties of its own. In- 
pressions have to be translated into ideas and pictures, 
and these in turn have to be communicated through 
words and rhythms. Thus limitations of logical grasp, of 
imagination, of language, and of music all go together 
to obstruct faithfulness to experience. We all have to 
learn sooner or later that even in our simplest tasks our 
reach somehow exceeds our grasp, so that what we ac- 
complish falls short of what we intended. And commonly 
our deepest impressions are those which most strenu- 
ously resist expression. Hence even gifted men often in 
sheer impatience and desperation fall back upon a lan- 
guage or a system of thought not their own which says 
things, as it were of its own independent force, that they 
do not wish to say; or again, attempting as best they may 
to express individual perceptions and impressions in 
terms of the prejudices and dominant conceptions of 
their own age, they say against their will what others 


7 The Art of Thomas Hardy (ed. of 1923), p. 172. 


268 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


have succeeded in imposing on them. Of course, this is 
true, as has just been indicated, in more or less important 
ways of all men, so that we properly enough disregard it 
for the most part, and only recall it now in the face of a 
very extraordinary and awful view of the human scene. 
And it suggests that perhaps Mr. Hardy has at times said 
more than he has meant to say, or has at least not suc- — 
ceeded in conveying his meaning with the shades of doubt 
or reservation which he may himself feel, so that to him 
his estimate of life may properly seem a less extraordi- 
nary and difficult one than to us. 

This is possible. It does account for Mr. Hardy’s un- 
fortunate and somewhat confusing use of the language of 
Schopenhauer, but perhaps it does little more. For it 1s 
probable that the ground of Mr. Hardy’s self-confidence 
lies rather in another meaning which the ideal of faith- 
fulness to experience may have. That phrase is not 
merely a cumbersome synonym for honesty, but denotes 
also what may be called a characteristic boast of natural- 
ism. In this use it is a literary equivalent of the inductive 
method of science, and, in addition, it implies that the 
man of letters makes the same claim as the scientist re- 
earding the scope of his work. Both propose, they tell us, 
to deal with what is real and with what alone is real. 
They engage disinterestedly to concern themselves with 
the world of actual fact, admitting nothing because men 
would like to believe it, banishing all that is merely im- 
aginative, and eagerly facing the worst so it be that thus 
they can reach the truth. They imply that not only is the 
truth their aim, but that they alone aim solely at the 
truth, with no preconceptions, no mixed desires, and no 
concessions to powerful or respectable authorities 
already in the field. Whence comes solace, asks Mr. 
Hardy, whence comes renewed courage to face the battle 
of life? 


THOMAS HARDY 269 


Not from seeing 
What is doing, suffering, being, 
Not from noting Life’s conditions, 
Not from heeding Time’s monitions ; 
But in cleaving to the Dream, 
And in gazing at the gleam 
Whereby grey things golden seem. 


Thus do I this heyday, holding 
Shadows but as lights unfolding, 
As no specious show this moment 
With its iris-hued embowment ; 

But as nothing other than 

Part of a benignant plan; 

Proof that earth was made for man. 


Thus he allowed himself to think on a holiday, while 
he rested from the severe pursuit of reality; yet even 
then he scarcely succeeded in deceiving himself, but re- 
mained inwardly faithful still to what he took to be the 
meaning of the literal aspect of phenomena. And this, 
unqualified submission to brute fact, is the ideal com- 
pressed into a phrase. The writer endeavouring to realize 
it aims to act, not as the interpreter, but as the mere 
reporter of impressions. These he wishes to let speak 
for themselves, he being regarded as a passive and im- 
personal collector of data. Thus Mr. Hardy wrote, in the 
Preface to Poems of the Past and the Present: ‘‘Unad- 
justed impressions have their value, and the road to a 
true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording 
diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced 
upon us by chance and change.’”® 

8In his essay entitled The Science of Fiction (The New Review, April, 


1891) Mr. Hardy speaks of selection and omission, ‘‘with an eye to being 
more truthful than truth (the just aim of Art).’’ At first sight this might 


270 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


This, I believe, goes far to explain Mr. Hardy’s confi- 
dence in his conclusions. He has felt completely sure of 
the rightness of his method, and it is of the essence of 
this method that it is to be followed without any regard 
whatever to the conclusions it opens up at the end of the 
road. This in itself makes a powerful appeal to men, akin 
to the ideal of justice administered without fear or 
favour, and Mr. Hardy’s confidence in his method is not 
at all surprising in view of what has already been said 
about the period when he reached manhood and began to 
think for himself. Nevertheless it is surprising that he 
should have retained it through the years, without spot 
or blemish, not only in the face of his conclusions, but 
also in the face of increasingly general knowledge of the 
real character of scientific method. 

It is impossible to suppose that Mr. Hardy is or has 
been at all disingenuous in pretending to disinterested 
impartiality in following a process of pure induction, but, 
if he is not disingenuous, he has been deceived. For he 
has not ever succeeded in doing what he has claimed to 
do, and for the best of reasons. We are commonly told 
that induction is the corner-stone of modern science, 
though it is also said that no single scientific discovery 
could ever have been made solely through the inductive 
method. What is more, both statements are true. Fruit- 
ful scientific work depends upon the formulation of hy- 
potheses, or likely guesses, by means of which experimen- 
tation is controlled to definite ends—either the rejection, 
appear to contradict what has just been said and his own words quoted 
above, but in reality Mr. Hardy is dealing with a different question in 
The Science of Fiction. He is speaking, not of the gathering of material, 
but of the artist’s work of eonstruction—of his task, once he has found his 
material, of giving it coherence, proportion, and emphasis. He is speaking, 


in other words, not of impressions, but of the artist’s work in dealing with 
their details, their component parts, so as to convey impressions truly. 


THOMAS HARDY 271 


modification, or acceptance of the hypotheses in question. 
In other words, the scientist is never a mere collector of 
data, but one who uses the data of experience for his own 
purpose, which is the discovery of ‘the habits of matter,’ 
or of the so-called laws of nature which enable us to pre- 
dict future occurrences and so to take practical advan- 
tage of our knowledge. To this end the scientist rigidly 
selects and controls the experience to which he binds 
himself to be faithful. His experience is doubly selected 
and controlled, first by the hypothesis which he is seek- 
ing to test, and secondly by the fact that he can test 
it only through the quantitative measurement of phe- 
nomena. Induction is thus of incalculable value as a 
limiting norm, but practically it means, as far as I am 
aware, only this: that it limits the sphere of scientific 
activity to that portion of experience which is quantita- 
tively measurable. Hence experience and hypothesis 
mutually control each other, while both are controlled by 
the limitations of experimentation. Science can deal with 
only a fractional part of the world in which we live and, 
within its sphere, one may say that fancy is controlled by 
fact, but that the facts are selected by fancy. 

So much as this, every one now knows about the proc- 
esses of science, but its bearing upon the claim of a novel- 
ist or poet that he deals faithfully with his experience, 
in the sense that he acts simply as an impersonal and 
impartial collector of data, is obvious and destructive. 
Not only is the individual’s experience limited in extent 
but, within the field of possible experience, it is further 
limited by the selective or purposive activity of the sub- 
ject. There is no way in which the subject can avoid this; 
so we are made. No writer or artist has ever simply held 
a mirror up to nature. To do this, one would have to be 
a mirror instead of a subject or, in other words, a reflect- 
ing thing instead of a conscious human being. As far as 


272 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


can be known, consciousness itself would not exist were 
‘t not for unrealized aims present in us as problems. It 
takes an inner as well as an outer stimulus to rouse and 
fix our attention. We take cognizance of those matters 
only in our environment which seem significant to us, and 
we are indifferent to or oblivious of the remainder. 

Hence it is that the man who attempts to act as a mere 
recorder of data can never achieve his aim. The fact that 
he has such an aim itself indicates that his mind has 
already taken up a definite attitude towards life; and this 
means that he has already to some extent determined the 
kind of experience he will record, and that he already 
has at least a tentative meaning to attach to his experi- 
ence. Since, however, in the present case the aim is an 
attempt to elude this necessity, what he actually does is 
to place himself at the mercy of his unregenerated tem- 
perament. Instead of consciously exercising some meas- 
ure of control over his experience for definitely conceived 
purposes, he allows himself to drift on the sea of change 
surrounding him. But this does not mean that he has 
succeeded in converting himself from a human being 
into a machine—it means only that he has given up as 
far as possible one kind of control for the sake of allow- 
ing free sway to another. He has forgone conscious, de- 
liberate control in order to be guided by the relatively 
blind complex of spontaneous feelings and desires which 
continually surge up in him from the centre of his being. 
It is difficult to see how any reader of Mr. Hardy’s novels 
and poems can avoid being struck by the fact that this is 
what has happened to him. Objective as his work is in 
method, it is in substance a singularly exclusive reflexion 
of his own unregenerated temperament. 

It has been said that though Mr. Hardy’s mind ‘“‘has 
been impregnated with modern ideas, his temperament is 


THOMAS HARDY 273 


essentially rustic, primitive, pagan.’”? What I have just 
sought to indicate is how modern ideas have served, not 
to curb, but to give free rein to this native disposition. 
It now remains to define it more exactly. In A Conversa- 
tion at Dawn Mr. Hardy makes one of the characters 
exclaim, 
No God intends 
To thwart the yearning He’s father to! 


He means, of course, that no god should do this, that if 
it is done, from whatever cause, it is wrong. We are made 
with certain feelings and desires; we are not responsible 
for their existence within us, but so we are fashioned 
without our advice or consent; hence if we are to discern 
any goodness in the world or in the nature of things it 
must be through the satisfaction of these natural wants 
of ours. A grievous outrage has been inflicted upon us if 
we have been given these wants only to find that they are 
not to be satisfied. Nor is there any ground for discrim1- 
nating between our various feelings and desires, terming 
some good and some bad. The only thing to be considered 
is the fact that they are all equally real, and hence all 
equally deserving of satisfaction. 

This kind of reasoning, which issues legitimately and 
indeed inevitably from Mr. Hardy’s naturalistic prem- 
ises, of course opens up a profound basis for endless 
complaint against the universe, of which, as we have 
seen, he has taken full advantage. Moreover, since he 
admits no qualitative standard of judgement, but only the 
quantitative one of intensity, it follows that he values 
chiefly those impulses and desires which arise from our 
animal nature. To what most men call the higher values 

9 Thomas Hardy, Poet and Novelist, by Professor Samuel C. Chew, p. 
143. Lionel Johnson had said the same thing: ‘‘ Modern though he be, and 
even of an ‘advanced’ modernity, his writings have a primitive savour, a 


tang of antiquity, an earthy charm, an affinity, a comradeship with nature.’’ 
(Post Liminium, p. 142.) 


274 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


of life he has remained almost, if not completely, blind; 
and there is no indication that it has ever entered his 
head to inquire whether or not the very conditions of 
life which he so deplores might favour the realization of 
those higher values. His idea of Paradise, were he to 
permit himself to play with the idea at all, would be very 
Mahometan. In fact, in a poem which gathers together 
the implications of many others, he explicitly exalts a 
group of pleasures which will be recognized as closely 
related to the traditional sacred trinity of the sensual 
man: 


Sweet cyder is a great thing, 
A great thing to me, 

Spinning down to Weymouth town 
By Ridgway thirstily, 

And maid and mistress summoning 
Who tend the hostelry : 

O cyder is a great thing, 
A great thing to me! 


The dance it is a great thing, 
A great thing to me, 

With candles lit and partners fit 
For night-long revelry ; 

And going home when day-dawning 
Peeps pale upon the lea: 

O dancing is a great thing, 
A great thing to me! 


Love is, yea, a great thing, 
A great thing to me, 
When, having drawn across the lawn 
In darkness silently, 
A figure flits like one a-wing 
Out from the nearest tree: 
O love is, yes, a great thing, 
A great thing to me! 


THOMAS HARDY 275 


Will these be always great things, 
Great things to me?.. . 
Let it befall that One will call, 
‘Soul, I have need of thee’’: 
What then? Joy-haunts, impassioned flings, 
Love, and its ecstasy, | 
Will always have been great things, 
Great things to me! 


But these great things of life are usually denied us or, 
if they are given, are given grudgingly, insufficiently, 
capriciously. If we do succeed in getting what we want 
it is straightway snatched from us; and if by chance we 
regain it we are only led to the discovery that what 
charmed us once charms us no longer. We can command 
neither things around us nor our own moods. Though 
we chase the most corporeal delights, the most intensely 
felt. pleasures, still, even these we find are will-o’-the- 
wisps, and this is Life. 


Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan, 
And Clyffe-hill Clump says ‘‘Yea!”’ 
But Yell’ham says a thing of its own: 
It’s not ‘‘Grey, grey 
Is Life alway !”’ 
That Yell’ham says, 


Nor that Life is for ends unknown. 


It says that Life would signify 
A thwarted purposing : 
That we come to live, and are called to die. 
Yes, that’s the thing 
In fall, in spring, 
That Yell’ham says :— 
‘‘Life offers—to deny !”’ 


Mr. Hardy’s hedonism is integral to his naturalism, 
and, though he has clung to both, in his utter disillusion- 


276 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ment he has found only emptiness in both. His conclusion 
that life offers what he seeks merely to deny it is, I think, 
irrefutable, and I should wish not to combat it, but to 
emphasize it. For most people, I should suppose, life is 
not really much happier or more joyful than Mr. Hardy 
would have us believe. There are few, of course, who 
share his unrelieved, profound despair; but there are 
probably also few who, though they find life worth living, 
do not value it chiefly for the enjoyment or happiness 
which they hope to obtain, rather than for that which 
they have obtained in the past or at present possess. Of 
these there are certainly many. It would appear, indeed, 
that the number of people who frankly make earthly or 
temporal happiness their life’s aim is far greater than it 
has been in some preceding ages, or perhaps in any pre- 
ceding age of which we know anything. It does not follow, 
however, that they are succeeding in their pursuit. This 
is a peculiarly difficult question to answer. About the 
whole subject of happiness a great deal of nonsense has 
been written and spoken, and about it there is also much 
self-deception, both unconscious and, strangely enough 
at first sight, conscious and deliberate. This deliberate 
self-deception is not really so strange, however, in the 
light of the fact that very many people of this age have 
come to the conclusion that temporal happiness is all that 
life can offer them. Belief in its possibility is with them a 
counsel of despair, as their only other alternative is the 
outlook of Mr. Hardy. 

Venturing briefly to suggest some considerations bear- 
ing on the pursuit of happiness, I should say, in the first 
place, that the multiplication of mechanical contrivances 
designed for comfort or distraction does not materially 
promote it, since desires multiply and fluctuate at least 
as fast, and since in general both multiply faster than 
our incomes. And probably the general prosperity of a 


THOMAS HARDY 277 


community or a nation has very little bearing on it, or, 
it may be, an adverse effect. Certainly the American busi- 
ness men who are excitedly telling the labouring classes, 
the ignorant foreigners, and some college professors how 
un-American they are in refusing to be contented with 
their lot, are not an illustration of the doctrine they 
preach, since they are obviously actuated by an acute, 
nervous anxiety which knows few scruples and occasion- 
ally seems to approach insanity. The boat which cannot 
be rocked is hardly a very seaworthy craft, and I do not 
think that many examples of secure and unalloyed happi- 
ness are to be found amongst its higher officers. 
Happiness, moreover, being subjective, can never be 
unmistakably inferred from any of the external condi- 
tions of life. Our least doubtful information on the sub- 
ject comes from ourselves, and when each of us consults 
that oracle he is very likely to discover that he cannot at 
present call himself happy, though he sees many other 
people who are, and he still hopes that presently he will 
be. As far as careful observation of others can take us, 
it appears that in general the happiest people are the 
most bovine and stupid. If one is able to learn from 
experience, if one is sensitive, imaginative, and reflective, 
one’s chances of happiness are lessened. A man of sense 
cannot continue blindly to indulge a hope perpetually 
deferred; and if a man’s lot does happen to be fortunate 
he must be singularly blind and callous to avoid uneasi- 
ness for his own future, and distress over the multitude 
of loathsome social and personal ills which surround him 
and form the background enabling him to call himself 
fortunate. Such a man, too, must be equally somnolent in 
order to rest contentedly in his present state, whatever 
that may appear to be in the eyes of others. Furthermore, 
the volume of palpable, unmistakable human distress and 
suffering is so great that we are in the habit of attribut- 


278 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


ing good fortune to others on very slight and often 
entirely negative grounds. 

I should not think of suggesting, of course—and no 
more does Mr. Hardy—that the great majority do not 
have moments of happiness, real and sometimes con- 
siderably prolonged, though generally paid for ata high 
rate. I do not mean at all to suggest, either, that genuine 
and permanent happiness is impossible of achievement ; 
but itis, I fancy, rare, and it is not likely to be recognized 
for what it is by any one save the man who is achieving it. 
For the truth is that happiness is a by-product, never to 
be won by him who deliberately seeks it for its own sake. 
It is a mood of satisfaction which comes with the success- 
ful pursuit of some purpose or end which the subject 
regards as worthy in itself; and its quality and perma- 
nence depend upon the character of the end one is pursu- 
ing. If one’s end is ephemeral or is found to be valueless 
as soon as it is attained, one’s happiness is bound to be 
equally fleeting, and one will look back upon one’s deeds 
and their rewards as alike vain and delusory. 

How common this experience is need hardly be asked. 
Only he who has never done anything can have wholly 
escaped it, and it is Mr. Hardy’s greatness that he has 
thus far seen life truly and has had the courage and skill 
to picture it honestly and vividly as he has seen it, despite 
all misunderstanding and sneers and abuse from his 
public. The creations of his sympathetic and powerful 
imagination live and will long continue to live in the 
minds of men because, even against our will, they force 
home to our saddened consciousness the tragic necessi- 
ties in which we are enmeshed, the vanity and emptiness 
of our little lives, the utter indifference of the vast phe- 
nomenal universe to all our concerns, the malignity of 
human nature itself, which shows that our enemy flour- 
ishes even within our most retired strongholds, and the 


THOMAS HARDY 279 


implacable if not completely hopeless warfare we wage 
for our souls’ safety, attempting to conquer outer nature 
to our purposes while, failing to examine those purposes 
themselves, we leave the subtler enemy within to entrench 
himself ever more and more firmly. Mr. Hardy has also 
shown deep and true insight in insisting that life’s tragic 
aspect is not touched, and cannot be touched, by our 
material progress, which at the most changes only the 
fringes and appearances of our lives, while their sub- 
stance remains what it has been. And he has succeeded, 
too, in achieving what neither Sophocles nor Shakespeare 
ever attempted or, as far as one knows, would have 
thought of attempting. For he has written of the common 
lives of common men; he has brought tragedy down from 
the princes and their courts of elder days to live amongst 
the ignorant, the obscure, and the mediocre. I hardly need 
add that of course he has not been the discoverer of the 
sufferings of the lowlier sons of earth, and that he has 
not been the first to feel them sympathetically; I mean 
only that he has, most notably amongst modern English 
writers, succeeded in doing what long had been thought 
impossible, in giving them tragic significance. 

It has to be said, however, that this is an equivocal 
achievement. For in thus making his humble figures and 
their elemental passions symbolic of the drama of all 
existence, he has robbed that drama of a meaning which 
alone gave it, not merely dignity, but worth. He has 
attained the necessary effect of vastness and universality 
only by submerging his characters in their surroundings, 
making them as a result wavering symbols of indifferent, 
non-moral, non-human natural forces. He has not merely 
vulgarized life in basing his complaints on the difficulty 
or impossibility of man’s satisfying his desire for enjoy- 
ment, but also, in cutting off man’s conscious life from 
reality and in robbing man completely of freedom, he has 


280 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


deprived life of significance. He has so, indeed, managed 
to contrive a new thing, if it was worth contriving—what 
one may call a cosmic, rather than a human, tragedy. And 
this, because it is something new in kind, it is profoundly 
misleading to link, as he himself has ventured to link it, 
with the theme of Greek tragedy and of the Christian 
Gospels. Here, moreover, if I may say so, lies Mr. 
Hardy’s own tragedy. His naturalistic philosophy has 
conspired to reinforce a native tendency, so that he has 
steadfastly, even truculently, remained blind to life’s 
higher values. Attempting an original treatment, in 
terms of modern thought and knowledge, of life’s funda- 
mental issues, he has been misled by pretentious hypothe- 
ses into the creation, not of protagonists of humanity, 
but of mere helpless puppets and manikins. Confusing 
the primitive and elemental with the real, he has been led 
to concentrate his attention upon those aspects of life 
wherein we are most completely the creatures of instinct 
and circumstance. Despite his insight and honesty he has 
been led into hopeless contradiction by his effort at any 
cost to force the fruit of human experience into the nar- 
row mould of a deterministic monism, which itself he has 
been unable to hold without further confusion. Faithfully 
obedient to this paradoxical and confused guess—a guess 
made in the light, not of human, but of physical data— 
he has in effect resigned his humanity. 

He remains, indeed, at one with the highest wisdom 
alike of Greece and of Christianity in insisting upon the 
immitigable evil inherent in our divided, phenomenal 
existence. But he is a whole world apart from those 
venerable authorities, invoked in his Preface to Late 
Lyrics and Earlier, in his failure to grasp the significance 
of that deep division in man’s nature which has led him 
to his own bitter and rebellious condemnation of the 
universe and which has led him, despite the complete 


THOMAS HARDY 281 


contradiction of his philosophy which it implies, to con- 
ceive his own work as a plea for increased charity be- 
tween men. For through this division within ourselves a 
new world is opened up to us, a world not phenomenal 
in its nature but timeless and changeless, a world of 
qualitative values, whose existence is as real in our ex- 
perience as that of the phenomenal world in which we 
also live, and a world which we can and do make progres- 
sively more and more our own in proportion as we learn 
the true lessons of experience. Much in our lives is hope- 
lessly beyond our control, in many directions we are help- 
less in the clutch of circumstance, but here there is a 
region of freedom which all men may win. We are born 
with nothing that is ultimately valuable for its own sake 
except a fighting chance—not for honour or reputation 
or earthly power, whether over nature or other men, nor 
for enjoyment—but a fighting chance to create a free 
human spirit. This alone it is which gives meaning and 
dignity and worth even to such existences as ours. And, 
we know not why, we know only from experience that so 
it is that, as we go into life, our hardships, our crosses 
and disappointments and sufferings, do actually open up 
to us the pathway to eternity. Mr. Hardy has felt this no 
less than the rest of us—all of his writing is the expres- 
sion of it—yet in persisting in his blindness to its only 
possible meaning he has failed to give an even intelligible 
account of the same enduring facts of life which have 
stood before his predecessors in tragic art and which 
they have turned to noble use. 


Vill. 
NATURALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 


Naturauism, as was said in the first of these essays, is as 
old as philosophy, and it will probably continue to mani- 
fest itself in ever new forms as long as men attempt to 
construct philosophical systems. The secret of its peren- 
nial strength lies on the surface of our Western eiviliza- 
tion. For naturalism takes its origin from the desire to 
know, from men’s desire to visualize their environment 
in simple comprehensive terms, from the desire somehow 
to grasp reality as an order, a system of regular law. In 
its beginnings it is a critical effort of the understanding, 
directed against crude, contradictory, and incomplete ex- 
planations of the universe and life drawn from tradi- 
tional sources. As such it not only deserves to be wel- 
comed by all true friends of humanity, but it has again 
and again vindicated itself in ways whose impressiveness 
and fruitfulness for civilization none can deny. 

Perhaps the case for naturalism has not often been 
more clearly and sanely stated than it was by William 
Wallace in his second course of Gifford Lectures, in 
which he reviewed and criticized the Earl of Balfour’s 
Foundations of Belief. Naturalism, he pointed out, like 
the rationalism of the eighteenth century, has been a pro- 
testing force, a creed subsisting by opposition to preva- 
lent notions thought to be erroneous and injurious. In 
its origin it was the protest, ‘‘not against the supernatu- 
ral in itself, but against a supernatural conceived as arbi- 
trary, incoherent, and chaotic: it was the protest against 
the idle profanity which thinks it has explained an event, 


NATURALISM 283 


when it has said, with pious gesture, that it is the work 
of God—as if aught were not the work of God.’’ The 
protest was made in the name of knowledge, and implied 
that man can understand the universe and his own place 
in it by the exercise of his eyes and his reason. But, the 
Earl of Balfour had asked, what would be a world which 
we should understand, or which we had thoroughly under- 
stood? ‘‘A world, clearly, without interest; the den of 
listlessness and dumb despair: or rather the ice-age of 
humanity, when to be and not to be would for once be 
absolutely alike. But, on the other hand, what were a 
world which we did not understand, had not in any meas- 
ure understood? A world full of fears rather than hopes: 
a perpetual uncertainty, a grisly mystery, which made 
darkness cover the earth, and gross darkness its peoples. 
The world which reason claims is one where she may go 
for ever on and never die: a world where nothing can be 
called utterly unknowable, though much may remain for 
ever unknown: a world where, as humanity accumulates 
more and more its intellectual and spiritual capital, we 
shall move about more and more freely, i.e., more and 
more wisely, as becomes those who are called to inherit 
the kingdom. The world which the genuine Naturalist 
desires is not different. It is a world of law.’” 

We all know the generous fulfilment which time and the 
efforts of men have brought to this desire. The search 
for a world of law has been wonderfully rewarded in 
terms of useful knowledge which has brought into being 
a new civilization of high complexity and vast wealth. 
And thus, as I say, the secret of the perennial strength 
of naturalism lies on the surface of our Western world. 
To put it vulgarly, it has paid, paid marvellously in coin 
exchangeable in the market-place; and as long as it does 


1 Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics, pp. 96, 97. Quoted 
by permission of the Oxford University Press. 


284 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


so it will appeal irresistibly to common sense. Our bene- 
fits have not been confined, moreover, to changes in the 
material aspects of our lives, because we have also been 
freed from many irrational fears, imaginary dangers, 
and ‘grisly mysteries.’ This is not the place to describe 
it at length, but our debt to the impulses which have pro- 
duced naturalism is incaleulable; and, as Wallace has 
pointed out, even the faults of naturalism have sprung 
from the creditable ‘‘desire to be honest, to say only what 
you can prove, to require thorough consistency and con- 
tinuity in the whole realm of accepted truths.’’ 

But, though these desires are creditable, so mixed are 
the conditions of life and thought that the gravest of 
faults have sprung from them. For while naturalism 
begins in a critical effort, as a movement of opposition 
to what is felt to be superstition or error, it also requires 
for its beginning a mood of audacity or, if one likes, of 
human self-confidence, which apparently knows no limits 
once it has made its appearance, though in itself it is 
blind and may without warning lead men into the deepest 
of pitfalls. Naturalism implicitly makes the claim that 
human intelligence can learn the essence and reasons of 
things, and so can achieve an understanding of the uni- 
verse as it actually is. Assuming that we do live in, and 
are ourselves parts of, a universe, the naturalist regards 
the phenomena about him as fleeting embodiments of one 
vast process of orderly change. By observation and ex- 
periment he begins to learn the ‘habits of matter’; he 
discovers ‘laws of nature’; he finds himself able to master 
nature, within limits, for his own purposes. But, then, by 
virtue of his creditable desire to ‘say only what he can 
prove, and to require thorough consistency and continu- 
ity in the whole realm of accepted truths,’ the naturalist 
begins to deny whatever is not in harmony with his own 
discoveries and so sets up a positive system or theory 


NATURALISM 285 


which pretends to completeness and finality. Thus natu- 
ralism has come to mean any system of thought which 
merges all ‘appearances’ in one common ‘nature,’ or 
process of change. 

This may seem innocent, as it is certainly ‘natural,’ 
but it has extraordinary consequences. For the unified 
conception thus obtained on the basis of objective study 
inevitably involves the sacrifice of human nature, and 
hence the destruction even of the ‘knowing’ naturalist 
who has conceived the picture. It can be achieved only by 
a process of abstraction in which the special, the excep- 
tional, the individual, is thrown aside as insignificant, 
while the common elements that remain are taken to con- 
stitute the objects’ essential nature. Thus rocks and trees 
and human beings are merged into one nature at the ex- 
pense of their several natures, and all things take place 
in necessary sequence, obedient to universal law. 

In this way a mental picture of a conceivable universe 
is obtained. And such pictures have during the last 
seventy-five years acquired not only a new definiteness 
and an astonishing wealth of detail, but also the value 
and authority associated with truth. The unconscious 
artists who have drawn them have found their assump- 
tions supported year by year ever more convincingly by 
the discoveries of science, so that the naturalistic view 
is by many no longer regarded as one amongst several 
possibilities, but as the only view consistent with present- 
day knowledge. 

And not merely our intellectual environment but our 
physical environment also at present impels us towards 
naturalism. As I have said, we are partakers in a new 
civilization. We live in a world which has been trans- 
formed—how greatly only a few of us really know—by 
the powerful union of business and applied science, a 
world in which most of us are the helpless creatures of 


286 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


the advertising man, the banker, and the technical expert, 
a world which has materialized our lives, confused our 
standards, and dulled our spiritual natures. The com- 
plexity of our social organization forces us together in 
vast herds and makes us dependent on each other for 
almost all things, whether great or trivial, so that we are 
merged, or even drowned, in our environment and ren- 
dered well-nigh helpless against its defects. We cannot 
live complete lives, nor exercise free choices, nor learn 
the lessons of rounded experience, not merely because 
the crowd is ever upon us, pressing in relentlessly, but 
also because we are all ourselves in effect involuntary 
employees of a vast corporation. Upon conformity our 
own livelihoods depend, and equally they depend upon 
the success of a general system which nobody has planned 
or foreseen and for which nobody is responsible. The cor- 
poration, indeed, impersonal, soulless, and relentless, 
working its will like a veritable force of nature, is a 
characteristic creation of our time and may serve as the 
typical illustration of those large and blind forces which 
pull us hither and thither and make us their creatures, 
until we become the unconscious slaves of routine thought 
and action ;—either that or the slaves of a blind, anarchi- 
cal spirit of rebellion. 

So it is that we are made ready for some naturalistic 
gospel. Yet even amidst our externalized, convenience- 
ridden, routine lives we can hardly remain long blind 
to the remarkable paradox inherent in a gospel invented 
by human beings for the sake of denying their own 
humanity. For this sums up the character of naturalism. 
It is a product of human imagination, as certainly and 
truly as is the Divine Comedy or Hamlet or Faust, and it 
represents a personal evaluation of life which must stand 
or fall by the test of common human experience. For it 


NATURALISM 287 


has behind it no peculiar authority which enables it to 
escape this ultimate test of all beliefs or creeds. 

We have been asked to accept naturalism on the 
authority of the exact sciences, but, though many may 
continue to be taken in by this supposed authority, there 
is no longer the excuse for it that once there was. It is 
clear that exact science, working as it must with objective 
data such as are susceptible of quantitative measure- 
ment, can deal with human beings only so far as they 
are animals and things, while it must remain silent about 
their specifically human characteristics. During a brief 
space this silence was taken, both by scientists and by 
philosophers, as equivalent to denial, but that time has 
quickly passed. For it is now generally realized that by 
no means all of the data of experience are susceptible of 
scientific treatment, so that we no longer feel obligated, 
from loyalty to the cause of knowledge, to shut our eyes 
to certain of the experienced facts of human life, or to 
attempt to explain them away by vehemently asserting 
that they ‘must’ have arisen from causes which bear no 
resemblance to them. 

And not only have we become aware that science is 
competent to deal merely with a limited portion of the 
field of experience, but we have also been almost violently 
forced in recent years to recognize the provisional char- 
acter and subjective colouring of such ‘science’ as we do 
have. ‘‘To judge from the history of science,’’ says a 
contemporary writer upon scientific subjects, ‘‘the scien- 
tific method is excellent as a means of obtaining plausible 
conclusions which are always wrong, but hardly as a 
means of reaching the truth.’” The face of science, in 
other words, is constantly changing, because of dis- 
coveries which are not simply new but revolutionary. The 


2J. W. N. Sullivan, Aspects of Science, a volume of brief essays written 
with competence and unusual charm. 


288 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


same writer goes on to say: ‘‘In the Victorian age the 
main lines of everything were settled; the chief features 
of the universe were known. There were matter and 
energy, and there was, of course, the ether. The astro- 
nomical and geological scales were known in broad outline, 

and a first survey of the march from ameba to man had 
been taken. The work of future ages was to fill in the 
details. The universe of the Victorians was a large and 
rather grand affair, but it was sombre. Those emotional 
barometers, the poets, in so far as they were aware of 
the scientific outlook, either ‘transcended’ it or were 
crushed by it. Jules Laforge furnishes an excellent exam- 
ple of the effect of the Victorian scientific outlook on an 
intelligent and sensitive mind. His reaction was to com- 
pose funeral dirges on the death of the earth and the 
extinction of mankind. The universe of the Victorians 
was objective, indifferent, tracing a purposeless pattern 
in obedience to ‘iron’ laws.’’ But in the space of only a 
few years physical science has been compelled to change 
its primary assumptions, so that it has not merely been 
extended, but has become a radically new thing, ‘‘and 
there are very good reasons for supposing that it 1s 
going to change still more. . . . The total effect of the 
new ideas is to make the universe of physics less objec- 
tive; to an unsuspected extent this indifferent universe, 
with its iron laws, is a product of our own minds.’’ 

It is fair, then, to say that science lends only an am- 
biguous and doubtful support to any kind of philosophy. 
The system-maker who builds on the provisional science 
of yesterday is very likely to find his constructions dis- 
credited at their source almost as soon as they are pub- 
lished. And the large pictures of reality which we draw 
with the aid of science are pictures only, structures of the 
mind, with no peculiar or sacred right to represent the 
truth, and with at best, indeed, a partial validity whose 


NATURALISM 289 


extent no one can measure and whose genuineness no one 
can assess. Naturalism, consequently, cannot properly 
claim the powerful support from science which has been 
its chief mainstay in recent years, while, judged on its 
own merits, it can only be regarded as a maleficent when 
not a self-destroying falsehood. 

These are strong words, but not, I believe, too strong ; 
and they are, I hope, sufficiently substantiated by the 
preceding essays. A philosophy, after all, is only the 
reflective statement of a gospel, of a personal evaluation 
of life, and has to be judged by its truth to general ex- 
perience. No interpretation of life ever offered to men 
has succeeded in taking equally into account all the facts 
of experience, it is true, but this failure is more disas- 
trous in some cases than in others because all the facts 
are not equally significant. And the trouble with natural- 
ism is that it wholly neglects the facts of experience 
which characterize us as human beings in order to empha- » 
size other facts which link us with the animal and inor- 
ganic worlds. These other facts are not to be denied, and 
when they are denied the forces which make towards 
naturalism have a critical task of the utmost importance, 
which deserves grateful acknowledgement, in drawing us 
back to a due recognition of them. But it is an entirely 
different thing to go over to the opposite extreme and to 
deny our specifically human nature itself, and it is this 
that naturalism inevitably does. ‘‘A too ardent assault 
upon superstition,’’ it has been well said, ‘‘may itself 
become a superstition, and a baleful one, for its cham- 
pions.’’* And such a baleful superstition naturalism be- 
comes whenever it presumes to erect itself as a positive 
interpretation of the universe. From the dawn of Kuro- 
pean thought to the present day it has again and again 


3 W. Wallace, Lectures and Essays, p. 96. Quoted by permission of the 
Oxford University Press. 


290 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


proved its usefulness as an instrument of criticism, but 
it has never attained autonomous expression without 
exhibiting its utter incompetence to deal with the signifi- 
cant facts of human life. 

For this the reason is clear, and it has in part been 
already indicated. Man is certainly an animal, linked with 
the ‘animal creation,’ and even with the ‘vegetable crea- 
tion,’ as the doctrine of evolution teaches us. Thus far 
man is purely a product of, or a part of, the natural 
world, and thus far we are all nowadays in agreement 
with the contention of naturalism. But at the same time, 
whether it is explicable or not, man is obviously, indubit- 
ably something more and other than an animal, and it is 
this difference, this otherness, in terms of which he char- 
acterizes himself as a human creature, and which to him 
is the crucially significant fact about himself. Hence in 
this fact any interpretation of life and of man’s relation 
to the universe which has the slightest claim to credence 
must centre itself. Yet it is precisely this fact which natu- 
ralism can make nothing of and must even attempt to 
deny in order to exist. And consequently it is impotent 
the moment it is asked to answer pertinent questions. 

Probably the most enlightening illustration of the in- 
competence of naturalism is afforded by the modern 
efforts, extending from the Renaissance to our own time, 
to construct a naturalistic ethics. They have been many, 
and they have uniformly ended in self-contradiction, in 
paradox, in the justification or praise of immorality, or in 
more or less baleful absurdities. This is a sweeping 
charge, but it cannot be seriously disputed. The most 
careful and dispassionate effort, so far as I know, which 
has been made in our time to examine the ethics of natu- 
ralism is the work of Professor W. R. Sorley. In discuss- 
ing the theory of evolution he points out that the 
tendency has been to evade or ignore the properly ethical 


NATURALISM 291 


question, and to substitute for any discussion of it an 
attempted historical treatment of the development of 
moral feelings and standards. ‘‘But this is not the ques- 
tion before us when we ask how good is distinguished 
from evil, or what the worth of things or conduct is, or 
how the ideal of life or ethical end is to be conceived. 
The question thus expressed in different forms implies 
a new point of view, and no amount of history can answer 
it. It is an irrelevant answer to the question ‘What is 
good?’ when we are given a mere record of men’s ideas 
about what is good and of the way in which these opin- 
ions arose. We ask about the validity of moral Judge- 
ments, and are put off by speculations concerning their 
history.’’ 

And when we press the really ethical question we dis- 
cover that there is a very good reason for the attempt to 
evade an answer. For the only ideal for conduct which 
evolution can reach is simply ‘‘the realization—or, 
rather, continuation—of human nature as it has been and 
swith this formal modification, that, while the various 
impulses are, so far as possible, to have free play given 
them, they should be developed in a harmonious man- 
ner. It seems doubtful, however, how far this tendency 
towards harmony is properly suggested by, or consistent 
with, evolution, which has implied a ceaseless struggle of 
opposing forces. At any rate, evolution does not seem 
competent to give any sufficient principle of relative sub- 
ordination between the various impulses, such as might 
add reality to the formal principle of harmony.’’ It in 
fact simply sets up as our ideal ‘Ceonformity to human 
nature as it is, or to the tendencies in it which are strong- 
est and most persistent.’’ 

Professor Sorley concludes that the theory of evolu- 
tion is resultless in ethics. He sums up the outcome of 
his inquiry by saying: ‘‘The further we go in examining 


292 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


any naturalistic theory of ethics, the clearer does it be- 
come that it can make no nearer approach to a solution 
of the ethical question than to point out what courses of 
action are likely to be the pleasantest, or what tendencies 
to action the strongest; and this it can do only within 
very narrow limits both of time and accuracy. As to what 
things are good it can say nothing without a previous 
assumption identifying good with some such notion as 
pleasant or powerful. The doctrine of evolution itself, 
which has given new vogue to Naturalism both in moral- 
ity and in philosophy generally, only widens our view 
of the old landscape. By its aid we cannot pass from ‘is’ 
to ‘ought.’ . . . The naturalists seem to be in the same 
difficulty as Dr. Johnson was when Boswell plagued him 
to give a reason for action: ‘ ‘‘Sir,’’ said he, in an ani- 
mated tone, ‘‘it is driving on the system of life.’’’ In 
their case too, the strength of the answer lies in its ‘ani- 
mated tone.’ ’”* 

Indeed, the whole history of the human race exhibits 
on every page the folly of naturalism’s attempt to merge 
man in his surroundings and to confound ethical with 
impulsive or unreflective action. Civilization is, it may 
be said, simply the record of man’s unceasing attempts 
to thwart, to oppose, to control nature—both his own 
nature and external nature—for purposes of his own. 
Dr. E. EH. Slosson candidly says in a recent book: ‘‘Ad- 
mire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her defects. 
Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet 
until we can stand erect and go our own way. Love 
Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping 
foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for 
at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may 
wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence, or earth- 


4 The Ethics of Naturalism, 2d ed., pp. 320-321, 302-303, 309, 326-327. 


NATURALISM 293 


quake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace 
of its achievement.’”° 

In the last century John Stuart Mill, with his usual 
clarity and vigour, gave almost classic expression to the 
same patent fact of history and experience in his essay 
on Nature. ‘‘Conformity to nature,’’ he says, ‘‘has no 
connexion whatever with right and wrong.’’ ‘‘The duty 
of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in 
respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to 
follow but to amend it.’’ He thus summarizes his conclu- 
sions: ‘‘The word Nature has two principal meanings: it 
either denotes the entire system of things, with the aggre- 
gate of all their properties, or it denotes things as they 
would be, apart from human intervention. In the first 
of these senses, the doctrine that man ought to follow 
nature is unmeaning’; since man has no power to do any- 
thing else than follow nature; all his actions are done 
through, and in obedience to, some one or many of 
nature’s physical or mental laws. In the other sense of 
the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, 
or in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course 
of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally 
irrational and immoral. Irrational, because all human 
action whatever, consists in altering, and all useful action 
in improving, the spontaneous course of nature: Im- 
moral, because the course of natural phenomena being 
replete with everything which when committed by human 
beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who en- 
deavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of 
things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be 
the wickedest of men.’” 

This undying opposition between man and his natural 
environment, between man and his own ‘natural’ self, 


5 Creative Chemistry, p. 10. 
6 Three Essays on Religion, American ed., pp. 62, 54, 64-65. 


294 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


needs, I should suppose, only to be recalled to our atten- 
tion in order to be admitted as the truth. The proof of it 
is all around us and within us, transparent and unesca- 
pable. And it is clear that for the sake of what at bottom 
is an esthetic motive—the desire for a simple, compre- 
hensive, and symmetrical unity—naturalism is content 
outrageously to deny the fundamental truth about human 
nature. For no necessary or compelling reason it thus 
seeks to stultify life, it becomes the agent of tragic con- 
fusions, and it serves as the justifying gospel of weak- 
lings and sentimentalists. Huxley himself, in his last 
years when he was endeavouring by reading and réflexion 
to make good some of the defects of his early education, 
found it necessary to admit the opposition between man 
and nature, despite the difficulties the admission brought 
upon him. This has been discussed above, in connexion 
with the lecture in which he stated his conclusions, the 
Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. In another 
essay written subsequently and published in the Fort- 
nightly Review, but never reprinted, Huxley explained 
the sense in which he used to assert that the Romanes 
Lecture was a very orthodox discourse on the text, 
‘‘Satan, the Prince of this World’’: ‘‘It is the secret of 
the superiority of the best theological teachers to the 
_ majority of their opponents that they substantially 
| recognize [the] realities of things, however strange the 
_ forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doc- 
_ trines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate 
_ depravity of man, and the evil fate of the greater part 
_ of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the 
essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus 
subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only 
lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me 
to be vastly nearer the truth than the ‘liberal’ popular 
illusions that babies are all born good, and that the exam- 


NATURALISM 295 


ple of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to 
remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach the 
ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is 
universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as 
that which represents ‘providence’ under the guise of a 
paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that every- 
thing will come out right (according to our notions) at 
last.’”" 

These lists are somewhat curious, but the important 
thing is that Huxley in the end came to see the evil impos- 
sibilities of naturalism and admitted that the best theo- 
logical teachers have substantially recognized, as other 
men have not, the realities of things. And this is the 
enduring worth of historic Christianity. Though the 
forms in which its substance is clothed have grown 
strange to modern eyes, and though it does not answer 
all the questions which, as the proverb has it, any fool 
can ask, still, historic Christianity does recognize the - 
enduring facts of life and does give them a sound mean- \ 
ing, and its estimate of human existence and its possibili-’ 
ties, when tried by the test of common experience, shows 
itself solid and true at the centre. 

Matthew Arnold once said that Cardinal Newman’s 
religion was ‘‘frankly impossible.’’ As we have seen, he 
regarded Newman with a feeling akin to veneration, yet 
he considered that in embracing the Roman faith New- 
man had set himself down as a victim of transparent 
delusion and of gross superstition, and had taken a step 
impossible to one who was not either ignorant of, or 
culpably indifferent to, well-nigh the whole realm of 
modern knowledge. Most would agree with this verdict, 
without pausing to examine the paradox which it in- 
volves. But it is at least curious and worthy of remark 

7An Apologetic Irenicon, Fortnightly Review, November, 1892. The 
above paragraph is quoted in Leonard Huxley’s Life of his father, II, 322. 


296 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


that out of this stronghold of delusion, superstition, and 
ignorance there came forth sweetness and light. For by 
universal consent Newman was not only himself a man of 
high and noble character but was also one who under- 
stood human nature almost miraculously. If anything is 
obvious, it is obvious that he knew the workings of the 
human heart, the springs of character, the motives of 
action, the subtle and various turnings of the spirit upon 
its restless course. Here he stood an acknowledged mas- 
ter, and the magic voice which held all Oxford spell- 
bound year after year still speaks its deep and sobering 
message from the volumes of his sermons. What he 
understood so well was nothing new, but precisely that 
which, underneath the ceaseless change of our ways of 
life, endures at the centre of human nature and forms 
the stuff of man’s abiding thoughts, and problems, and 
hopes, and achievements in the gaining of inner freedom 
and peace, and in spiritual growth. We may pause for a 
moment to listen to him who speaks better for himself 
than others can speak for him. Our ‘‘sense of the noth- 
ingness of human life, impressed on us by the very fact 
that it comes to an end, is much deepened, when we con- 
trast it with the capabilities of us who live it. Had Jacob 
lived Methuselah’s age, he would have called it short. 
This is what we all feel, though at first sight it seems a 
contradiction, that even though the days as they go be 
slow, and be laden with many events, or with sorrows or 
dreariness, lengthening them out and making them tedi- 
ous, yet the year passes quick though the hours tarry, and 
time bygone is as a dream, though we thought it would 
never go while it was going. And the reason seems to be 
this: that, when we contemplate human life in itself, in 
however small a portion of it, we see implied in it the 
presence of a soul, the energy of a spiritual existence, of 
an accountable being; consciousness tells us this con- 


NATURALISM 297 


cerning it every moment. But when we look back on it in 
memory, we view it but externally, as a mere lapse of 
time, as a mere earthly history. And the longest duration 
of this external world is as dust and weighs nothing, 
against one moment’s life of the world within. Thus we 
are ever expecting great things from life, from our inter- 
nal consciousness every moment of our having souls; and 
we are ever being disappointed, on considering what we 
have gained from time past, or can hope from time to 
come. And life is ever promising and never fulfilling ; and 
hence, however long it be, our days are few and evil.’”* 

I quote this passage almost at random, one out of very 
many, but it is not necessary to ‘prove’ what all have 
admitted from the days when Newman was preaching in 
St. Mary’s Church to the present time. This conceded 
fact, however, does itself prove that there must at least 
be important elements in Newman’s religion which 
should be excepted before one agrees that it is ‘‘frankly 
impossible.’’ I am not at all concerned to try to deny, or 
to gloss over, those portions of Roman Catholic belief 
and practice which most outside of that church would 
now regard simply as the unholy relics of a past age of 
ignorance or relative barbarism. I should myself agree 
that Roman Catholicism is at present so encumbered with 
these survivals as to make it an ‘impossible’ religion for 
honest and enlightened men and women. Yet at the same 
time it seems obvious that a simple rejection of Catholic 
Christianity is made also impossible by such a witness as 
Newman, whom I instance alone not because he stands 
alone, but merely because he is in this pre-eminent 
amongst Englishmen of the nineteenth century. The reli- 
gion in which he was nurtured, in terms of which he 
thought and acted and learned whatever he knew, must 


8 Parochial and Plain Sermons, IV, 215-216. 


298 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


contain within it fundamental and enduring truths, else 
it could never have ministered fruitfully to such insight 
as his nor have helped him to such knowledge as he 
showed of man’s inner life, its meaning and issues. | am, 
I hope, no fonder of delusion and superstition and igno- 
rance than others, and I should wish to throw all my 
strength against them wherever they show their heads, 
yet it seems to me that only a blind and wilful prejudice 
can refuse to acknowledge that these children of darkness 
did not prevent Newman from knowing what men should 
know about themselves, and that, indeed, a religion which 
many would now call a tissue of falsehood from begin- 
ning to end actually developed and brought to maturity 
in him precisely the kind of knowledge most significant 
for us as human beings. To candid minds this must be an 
arresting and disturbing fact. And when one reflects that 
the modern knowledge because of which many have repu- 
diated Christianity is a ‘knowledge’ whose inevitable 
tendency is to belittle and obscure our humanity and its 
significance, it becomes—if one cares to put it paradoxi- 
cally—a nice question whether this ‘knowledge’ is as 
beneficial to us as Newman’s delusions and ignorance 
were to him. No human belief is unmixed with error, as 
Newman knew better than some who consider themselves 
more enlightened, and it is a real question whether New- 
man’s errors, now seemingly so patent, were as serious 
as those of our contemporaries who know so much more 
about their kinship with beasts than with angels. 

It is told of Bossuet that, when he was once asked if 
he did not think there were interesting things to be 
learned from following the scientific speculations of his 
day, he replied that he had no doubt of the interest of 
those speculations but that he considered it beneath the 
dignity of a bishop to pay serious heed to them. The 
story is two-edged, and it would be better for all of us 


NATURALISM 299 


had he and others like him been of a different mind; but, 
on the other hand, there is profound truth in Bossuet’s 
reply if it be taken to mean that exact knowledge of mate- 
rial phenomena, important and useful as it is, may still 
not be the most important and useful knowledge for men, 
and may lead them widely and tragically astray if it 
blind them to their real vocation on the battle-field of 
their inner lives. The truth which is always being for- 
gotten and which must ever be rediscovered by the indi- 
vidual, if it is rediscovered, through the hard lessons of 
experience, is that the exact sciences cannot of them- 
selves give us anything that is ultimately valuable. They 
are means, not ends, and they are means, moreover, only 
to the use of the kind of material with which they can 
deal. He who loses himself in them, and attempts to limit 
his life by their limitations, loses himself indeed in a 
deathlike unmeaning flux.’ 

And in fact men half-consciously know this. It was a 
very common belief amongst contemporaries of Arnold _ 
and Huxley that not only Christianity, but religion, was 
destined presently to disappear from the earth and no 


® Some sentences may be quoted here from an article by W. H. Mallock, 
‘‘Cowardly Agnosticism’’ (Fortnightly Review, April, 1889). The article 
was addressed to Huxley but he, with his usual skill in choosing opponents, 
never made a public reply to it. It is vitiated by faults which enter more 
or less into all of Mallock’s writings, but it is acute, and deserves to be 
read in its entirety. ‘‘Theologic religion does not say that within limits the 
agnostic principle is not perfectly valid and has not led to the discovery 
of a vast body of truth. But what it does say is this: That the truths 
which are thus. discovered are not the only truths which are certainly and 
surely discoverable. The fundamental principle of agnosticism is that noth- 
ing is certainly true but such truths as are demonstrated or demonstrable. . 
The fundamental principle of theologic religion is that there are other . 
truths of which we can be equally or even more certain, and that these are 
the only truths that give life a meaning and redeem us from the body of 
death. Agnosticism says nothing is certain which cannot be proved by 
science. Theologic religion says, nothing which is important can bese? 
Here is the dilemma which men, sooner or later, will see before them; 


300 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


longer to cloud our atmosphere. The belief was so com- 
pletely mistaken that no one can now be found who per- 
sists In it, and men, whether they like it or not, are ready 
to agree that religion will never disappear. It will not do 
so because, ultimately, it is the embodiment of man’s 
enduring conviction that life is significant and does con- 
tain ‘intimations of immortality.’ The real question is 
what kind of religion we are to have. There is no magic 
to prevent our having a bad or perverted religion. Reli- 
gions, like other institutions, are affected by the societies 
amidst which they exist, and may so become corrupt, 
decadent, and even vicious, just as religion in America 
to-day on the whole reflects the ignorance, the shallow- 
ness, the prejudice, and the specialism characteristic of 
our culture and education. Is it still possible that Chris- 
tianity should serve us in the future as once it served 
men in a very different age, guiding them to their true 
vocation with no uncertain light and confidently opposing 
the plausible and attractive forms of naturalism? It is 
perhaps not impossible, and one would need to examine 
the very considerable efforts now being made to recon- 
struct or revive Christian belief before venturing upon 
an answer.”” But this at least would appear to be certain: 
that no existing form of Christianity as it now stands can 
greatly help us or look forward to a large future, and yet 
that no religion of the future can hope to achieve true 


- and they will then have to choose one alternative or the other. What 
their choice will be I do not venture to prophesy; but I will venture to call 
them happy if their choice prove to be this: To admit frankly that their 
present canon of certainty, true so far as it goes, is only the pettiest part 
of truth, and that the deepest certainties are those which, if tried by this 
canon, are illusions. To make this choice a struggle would be required with 
pride, and with what has long passed for enlightenment; and yet, when it 
is realized what depends on the struggle, there are some at least who will 
think that it must end successfully. ’’ 

10I hope to deal with this question in a later volume. 


NATURALISM 301 


success which does not substantially embody the inter- 
pretation of life, its meaning, possibilities, and rewards, 
which historic Christianity has presented to past genera- 
tions. 

Christianity as it now stands is moribund, as practi- 
cally every one sees. And it is moribund not so much 
from the ‘wickedness of the people,’ though they are 
wicked enough, as from its own internal failures. Gradu- 
ally since the Reformation it has sunk lower and lower 
in the scale of existence, until it has so nearly severed all 
intelligence and enlightenment from itself as to make 
men wonder how its few great outstanding figures can 
have honestly and sincerely taken up the cross. Attempt- 
ing to iron out differences by the tyrannical method of 
exclusion, it has only multiplied sects and damned good 
men until it has dispersed its one-time strength almost, 
if not quite, irremediably. Even Rome itself has more and 
more taken on the character of an exclusive sect, so that 
it shares many of the worst traits of its revolted children 
and has exaggerated some of them. Newman’s conception 
of a living church is, it would seem, the only possible one, 
and there is the whole sad story of his later life to show 
that Rome can no longer pretend even to understand it, 
much less to embody it. The excommunication of Tyr- 
rell” and M. Loisy, moreover, proves the fact beyond the 
possibility of doubt. Not that I should contend that the 
doctrines of Tyrrell and M. Loisy should have been for- 
mally accepted, for I do not see how Rome could have 
accepted them without ceasing to be Christian; but there 
is a world of difference between intelligent opposition 

11 Perhaps accuracy demands the qualification that Tyrrell suffered only 
the minor excommunication and that his case was still, ostensibly at least, 


under consideration at Rome when he died. He was, however, denied burial 
with Catholic rites. 


302 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


and the mere stupid, self-betraying assertion of infalli- 
bility. 

But if there are few notes of a living church in Rome, 
there are fewer still in the ranks of Protestantism—the 
one possible exception being the Anglican Church. This, 
however, subsists only on the basis of illogical expedients 
which must be a standing amazement to any one not an 
Englishman and not brought up within the bosom of 
that strange fold. And for the rest it is sufficient here to 
say that Protestantism by its very nature is, what its 
whole history amply and unmistakably shows, a subver- 
sive, anarchical, self-destroying force. Very probably 
Luther and Calvin will come to stand out in the pages of 
history as the wilful, headstrong destroyers of Christian- 
ity ;—perhaps with some injustice, as the corruption and 
decadence of Catholicism at the beginning of the six- 
teenth century was manifest and hideous, and called for 
heroic measures. But if nothing short of separation and 
the creation of sects could have sufficed, it is by now clear 
enough that the remedy was as bad as the disease, and 
that the Reformation should in this case be regarded 
simply as the first overt stage of an inevitable disintegra- 
tion. And indeed the real character of Protestantism was 
not unapparent even in the beginning to Luther himself 
and to some of his co-workers. We have ‘‘a painful series 
of confessions of disappointment with the moral results 
of their work on the part of the Reformers themselves, 
and especially of Luther. It is difficult to give an idea of 
the weight of this evidence [except by the accumulation 
of quotations. But] in passage after passage Luther de- 
clares that the last state of things was worse than the 
first; that vice of every kind had increased since the 
Reformation; that the nobles were greedy, the peasants 
brutal; that the corruption of morals in Wittenberg itself 
was so great that he contemplated shaking off the dust of 


NATURALISM 303 


his feet against it; that Christian liberality had alto- 
gether ceased to flow; and that the preachers were neither 
held in respect nor supported by the people. Towards the 
close of his life these complaints became more bitter and 
more frequent. Sometimes the Devil is called in to ac- 
count for so painful and perplexing a state of things.’’” 
Possibly the Devil did have a hand in it, but at any rate 
what Luther saw were the earliest symptoms of a disin- 
tegration of spiritual and intellectual forces which 
Protestantism has steadily, if always unwillingly, con- 
tinued to promote. 

The fundamental tragedy of Christianity is its persist- 
ence in holding to relatively external forms, and its re- 
garding these as final and inviolable and essential, while 
it has neglected the inner substance of its message. That 
inner substance is imperishable and will not vanish from 
amongst men, nor cease to oppose itself to all forms of 
naturalism, but perhaps those who in the future bear 
witness to it will not be Christians. For as Christianity 
now is, it has become a necessity, in the name of honesty, 
in the name of truth to the spirit, in the name of religion 
itself, for those who are most alive to its abiding verities 
to remain outside of its doors. It may not always continue 
so, but change, if change there is to be, will have to come 
from the pious upholders of use and wont. Perhaps they 
may yet remember one of the luminous sayings of Cole- 
ridge: ‘‘My opinion is thus: that deep thinking is attain- 
able only by a man of deep feeling, and that all truth ts a 
species of revelation.’’ Perhaps they may yet remember 
that ‘in a higher world it is otherwise, but that here below 
to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed 
often.’ 

However this may be, it is not doubtful that men will 


12 The Reformation of the Siateenth Century, etc., by Charles Beard, 
fifth ed., pp. 145-146. 


304 CHRISTIANITY AND NATURALISM 


continue to see life as Christians in the past have seen it. 
It is not doubtful, because the Christian view of man is 
simply the summation of lessons of common human expe- 
rience which all may learn whose eyes are open and 
whose hearts are honest. ‘‘Life is ever promising and 
never fulfilling.’’ ‘‘We still crave for something, we do 
not well know what.’’ ‘‘You must either conquer the 
world or the world will conquer you.’’ ‘‘The world may 
seduce, may terrify, may mislead, may enslave, but it 
cannot really inspire confidence and love.’’ The world 
‘‘has no substance in it, but is like a shade or phantom; 
when you pursue it, when you try to grasp it, it escapes 
from you, or it is malicious, and does you a mischief. We 
need something which the world cannot give.’’ How can 
these aphorisms be gainsaid? We need only acquaintance 
with ourselves to know that man is a fearful compound 
of grandeur and misery. He is an animal, and often 
enough a beast, yet he wonderfully transcends the phe- 
nomenal world and finds his true home in a far region of 
immaterial reality. He learns to know himself and to rise 
beyond himself through struggle, through disappoint- 
ment and suffering and even defeat, at least as certainly 
as through the experience of good fortune and the taste 
of earthly enjoyment. All experience can teach him 
heavenly truths, yet none teaches him anything whatso- 
ever unless it points beyond itself and preserves him 
from being enslaved by the world in a stupid contentment 
which is the death of the spirit. The probationary char- 
acter of life, the fact that man, animal though he inex- 
plicably be, is yet a spirit, fighting his way towards free- 
dom in the realm of immaterial reality—these are truths 
which time does not wither. 


INDEX 


ABERCROMBIE, Lascelles, 235, 245. 

Agnosticism, 138. 

Ainger, Alfred, 209. 

Alexander, A., 5. 

Anaximander, 2-4, 

Andrewes, Lancelot, 104. 

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 13. 

Aristotelians, 85. 

Aristotle, 3, 37, 184. 

Arnold, Matthew, 36, 156 ff., 227, 
233, 295. 

Arnold, Thomas, 104. 

Atterbury, Francis, 22. 

Augustine, Saint, 93. 


Bacon, Francis, 33, 85. 

Balfour, Arthur James, Earl of Bal- 
four, 282, 283. 

Beveridge, William, 104. 

Bible, 8 ff., 57 ff., 128 ff., 168-169, 
180 ff. 

Blair, Hugh, 22. 

Boehme, Jacob, 41, 46. 

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Vis- 
eount, 19. 

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 298. 

Bradlaugh, Charles, 180. 

Brennecke, Ernest, jr., 244. 

Brodie, Sir Benjamin, 126. 

Browning, Robert, 166. 

Bull, George, 103. 

Burnet, John, 3, 4. 

Butler, Joseph, 82. 

Butler, Samuel, 36, 198 ff. 


CALVIN, John, 10, 33, 302. 

Cambridge Platonists, 62. 

Campbell, J. Dykes, 40, 46, 47. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 64, 65, 67, 70, 121, 
133. 

Catholicism, 8-9, 111-112, 297. 

Chew, Samuel C., 273. 


Chillingworth, William, 11 ff. 

Church, R. W., 109. 

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 28. 

Clarke, Samuel, 21-22. 

Clement of Alexandria, 114. 

Clifford, William Kingdon, 180. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 34 ff., 70, 
C1, Ze kOss Okt eel mtoo, bao, 
303. 

Consciousness, 221 ff., 231. 

Culture, 175 ff., 186, 188 ff., 197. 


DaRwIN, Charles Robert, 122, 123, 
124, 201, 202, 203, 215, 258. 

Davy, Sir Humphrey, 85. 

Descartes, René, 33. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Bea- 
consfield, 188. 


EVOLUTION, 5, 122, 129. 


FIcHTE, Johann Gottlieb, 44, 45, 46. 
Fox, George, 41. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 85. 

Froude, James Anthony, 70, 79. 
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 79, 96, 103. 


GALILEO, 128. 

Garwood, Helen, 244. 

Gibbon, Edward, 23 ff., 72, 92. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 162 
ff., 167, 172, 184, 220. 

Green, John Richard, 126. 

Green, Joseph Henry, 47. 


HAMILTON, Sir William, 139. 

Hardy, Thomas, 235 ff. 

Harrison, Frederic, 189, 194. 

Hartley, David, 36, 37, 40, 42, 61. 

Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard 
von, 244. 

Hazlitt, William, 65. 


306 


Heine, Heinrich, 162, 164. 

Herbert, George, 14. 

Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 14-15, 
16, 20. 

Hobbes, Thomas, 18. 

Homer, 40. 

Hooker, Richard, 13. 

Horace, 184. 

Hume, David, 20, 24, 25, 42, 43, 
49, 72, 139. 

Hutton, R. H., 108, 154. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 74, 123 ff., 
176, 180, 202, 233, 294, 295, 299. 


JAMBLICHUS, 40. 

Job, 196. 

Johnson, Lionel, 267, 273. 
Johnson, Samuel, 50, 292. 
Jones, H. Festing, 198. 


Kant, Immanuel, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 
82. 

Keble, John, 79, 96, 97, 100, 121. 

Kingsley, Charles, 74, 108, 136, 144. 

Knowles, James, 74. | 


LAFORGE, Jules, 288. 

Lamb, Charles, 39. 

Law, William, 35, 41, 75. 
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 44. 
Liberalism, 89 ff. ; 
Locke, John, 20, 24, 40, 42, 72. 
Loisy, M. Alfred, 301. 

Luther, Martin, 302, 303. 

Lyell, Sir Charles, 121. 


MALLOcCK, W. H., 299. 
Manning, Henry Edward, 138. 
Metaphysical Society, 138. 
Miletus, 1, 2. 

Mill, John Stuart, 67, 293. 
Milton, John, 235. 

Miller, Johannes, 4. 


NAPOLEON, 248, 
Natural Selection, 147, 216 ff. 
Neo-Platonists, 39, 40. 


INDEX 


Newman, John Henry, 70ff., 121, 
123, 133, 138, 164, 295-298, 301. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 85. 


ORIGEN, 114. 

Owen, Robert, 122. 

Oxford Movement, 70, 76, 77, 79, 
96, 105, 108. 


PAINE, Thomas, 72. 

Pater, Walter, 139. 

Pattison, Mark, 121, 

Pindar, 40. 

Plato, 28, 37, 39, 41, 49, 184. 

Plotinus, 40. ‘ 

Poole, Thomas, 38. 

Pope, Alexander, 19. 

Praxiades, 2. 

Protestantism, 10 ff., 87 ff., 112, 164- 
165, 302. 

Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 101. 

Pythagoras, 49. 


REFORMATION, 8 ff., 32, 302. 
Robinson, H. Crabb, 46. 
Rogers, Arthur Kenyon, 122. 
Royal Society, 123. 


Saint-BEuvE, Charles Augustin, 164, 
168, 173, 174. 

Schelling, F. W. J. von, 44, 45, 46. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 244, 268. 

Science, 2, 5, 6, 7, 124, 146, 147, 148, 
173, 176, 202, 287, 288. 

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 
Cooper, Third Earl of, 19, 21. 

Shairp, J. C., 189, 190. 

Shakespeare, William, 279. 

Shaweross, J., 45, 46, 63. 

Sherman, Stuart P., 158, 192. 

Sidgwick, Henry, 190, 191, 193. 

Simon, John, 47. 

Sinclair, Sir J. G. T., 139. 

Slosson, E. E., 292. 

Smith, John, 14. 

Sophocles, 159, 279. 

Sorley, W. R., 290, 291. 

Spinoza, Baruch, 167, 220. 





INDEX 


Stephen, Sir Leslie, 22, 36, 123, 206. 
Sterling, John, 64. 

Strauss, David Friedrich, 208. 
Sullivan, J. W. N., 287. 

Swift, Jonathan, 212. 


TayLor, Thomas, 40. 
Tennyson, Alfred, 156, 166. 
Thales, 1-2. 

Tillotson, John, 18. 

Tindal, Matthew, 17, 63. 
Toland, John, 16-17, 18, 63. 
Trail, isa) 62: 

Tyrell, George, 301. 


307 


VoLTairE, 37, 61, 72. 


WALLACE, William, 282 ff., 289. 

Ward, Wilfrid, 83, 110. 

Ward, William George, 138. 

Wesley, John, 35. 

Whately, Richard, 101. 

Whichcote, Benjamin, 13. 

Wilberforce, Samuel, 125, 126, 134. 

Wilson, Thomas, Bishop of Sodor 
and Man, 184, 191, 195. 

Wilson, S. L., 236. 

Wordsworth, William, 44, 63, 164, 
184, 188, 235. 





Ue ie 
fe 
oe, 











Cee 2 


v8 
ae 
a 











+. re ‘ 





: i y : 
ree 14 


7 = re) oy 


Vommaritn’, 6 
vi * 





on 
ay 





‘. é' Li, ni | 
‘ , » e yx 
si? , i) 
af 
¢ Ory 
} ? ct 5 
q. a - T= ' 
Leta auras 1: ae 
i} | ia -. eri Ay ye 
‘\ ees ? 2 ie Ve j Ly ie 
il hy & ou sleet ery 
8 fy : ‘ y nary i. j | 
ae Blitg 
\ 
i ; 
| awe i‘ ; 
mi be 5 Of 2 
, y 
' ij 
Oey oir 
ij 9 ' ra 
tee f J 
a 
‘ 
] 
: y if ' 
j 
m4} 
y is 
‘ ¥) 
i ‘ 
( : H 
j a 
Dans 1 
“ fi, j ' 
- { 
tel re 
: Jt | Me 
A vy en ‘ j \ 
7 Je 
rea A af 
7 a ~ 4) . 5 
’ a \ a a 
io t om Mn yh 
Ron ean se Oh) 
q ' 4 
Pa ws ae MT } 7 
; a a 
eee PAs hy 
é 7 ~~ i" ry 
» “w4" = 


‘ 
P 
' 
i 
i 
i 
: ' 
j 
i 
, 
A 
# 
if “te 
i Yee 
oy 










ff A 
, Peay ‘ ; hi \ a tk eat fa 
yen Alay Les a hae ee fa q ms, Lia At ae a cp. by 
rane i «Wh CAA a hone FRE we a, TAA aa +) Hi 150 
cae Lar May et) a 






i 
has q 
Gal, 





Peed ite AMIS hie?) The ie 








Menthe t, 1 ; o ‘ ; AA ly : A Poe y 


Mean \ (Wi) 0 e 


ut i bee t “4 


[Oe . Cat toyed ovale a ha oe aueyy 
j fe! By Pail 
EN AA ed 


Te 


DATE DUE 


GAYLORD 





ah 
| 


eghart ar ~~ 7 
rey 8 


AM Thee ; 
ACR at eke 


' an i 
ice ) mn 
My mo 


nay 
re 


‘x : 
i 


ae er 


® 


Ls 


> <a 
Om 
, eye 


"7 
1A 





nite 
ct : SAGE it , aU ay 
Waits PPA PC ara Cd ibslees at, 
: aN bh ee, MME WE Ae RN 
ROW Wty A | 
wine vee ie wy 

OOS Ae oe 

HQ AE WGN 

© WEY Waray i 


vy" 


@ wou ys 


‘ wy 
& MY de © y 
NOUR, Whi a Ge 

VA 


ef 
ey Pe a 
Ce Me eae 


hy rr at a) 

/ Ease y wt hs ‘ Ae 

"Hs Lon at aay begin. Ae PA. ¢ 
eee Tes 
Oe eae et ' 





